A week ago Sunday, I walked among crowds of mothers, grandmothers, and children of all ages celebrating Mother’s Day at the Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, Missouri. As I watched happy families, I couldn’t help being jealous. Though I was there with my grandmother and other close relatives, I missed my mom, especially since I was in my hometown for her funeral the day before. Had my mom been alive and well, we might have walked those same paths ourselves and enjoyed the new life teeming above the earth. Instead, my mother lost her battle of more than six years with Lewy Body dementia the week before at the age of 61.
As a biologist, I was well-aware of Alzheimer disease in the abstract, and tau proteins, beta-amyloid, and genetic predisposition. But until my mom was diagnosed in 2008, I was painfully ignorant of dementias other than Alzheimer disease. Once we knew what mom was fighting, I learned that Alzheimer disease and Lewy Body are hardly unique. The number of other dementias that exist is long and includes vascular dementia, mixed dementia, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Huntington disease, and many others.[1]
