Wednesday, July 10, 2024

There're Differences Between Cognitive Regression & Alzheimer's - Can We Tell The MAGAs To Get Clue One?

 

                 Will voters learn too late that Trump is in early Alzheimer's?


Janice's cousin Desmond was once a man of quick wit and endless curiosity, especially about astronomy and cosmic physics. When I saw Desmond in 2003 at the family vacation beach house, we had a long  conversation and debate about the mass limits of stellar black holes and also the estimated mass of the galaxy-gobbling hole at the center of the Milky Way.  Merely seven years later, he was reduced to a hollow shell,  his intellect only a faint wisp. He was in the personal hell of Alzheimer's disease, barely able to babble a single sentence.  

Here I also recall my sister-in-law Krimhilde, 

Krimhilde and Desmond, both victims of late stage Alzheimer's

who became totally dependent after the scourge of Alzheimer's struck by her 80th birthday.  It began with small distortions of perception that steadily grew larger and finally obscured reality, ending up with being unable to open a door or find the bathroom.

The critical research that showed how Alzheimer's results from the death of nerve cells in the key memory centers of the brain came too late to help Desmond or Krimhilde.  As shown in the accompanying diagrams at top the region of the brain encompasses two paired structures symmetrically set on both sides linking the hippocampus to the rest of the brain.  New memories reside here temporarily  before they're filed in the frontal cortex. If the circuitry in these structures is damaged, say by the accumulation of what are called 'tangles' (insoluble threads of a protein called 'tau') and plaques (insoluble lumps of a protein called beta amyloid), e.g.

                               P
laques and tangles destroy healthy brain tissue


then vulnerable memories can be lost forever.  Alas, the disease not only wipes out new memories but the ability to learn.  Add to this the age-related changes that occur even in healthy people and the result is the premature death of personality.  Two abnormal proteins (tangles and plaques) act in concert to destroy neurons in the brains of Alzheimer's victims. 

How to tell the difference between normal healthy brain response in aging and evidence of Alzheimer's ravages?  In a normal older person doing a memory task a computer-enhanced image will show the memory centers (the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex) are activated.  In an individual with Alzheimer's the pattern is disturbed. The memory centers fire weakly and at the wrong time.  It is safe to say from these comparisons, that Joe Biden is suffering from the cognitive regression of normal aging (like I am) but Trump has displayed already the telltale perceptual and memory warpage that accompanies early Alzheimer's. 

It’s Trump — believe it or not - who actually has a family history of dementia (Alzheimer’s in his father, Fred)— and who’s increasingly inchoate.  But he manages to hide it by compensating with a loud and rapid cadence as he barks streams of lies.  This fools enough voters into thinking he has the cognitive edge (and energy) over Biden. He does not. It's purely an illusion and partly attributable to his showmanship as a reality TV personality.

I already wrote a post about his batshit insane nonsense about sharks, batteries and sinking boats, i.e.

 Yeppers, Trump Is As Crazy As A "Shit House Rat" -

 that surely ought to be a heads up to the nation about Trump's emerging Alzheimer’s. (One of the early signs for Janice’s cousin Desmond were tales of space aliens stealing mangoes from his mango tree in his back yard.)  Also, a shot over the bow to Trump's big money donors like Duke Buchan III (WSJ Exchange, July 6-7).  Does the Duke really want his $50.1 mil down the crapper if Trump goes total Alzheimer's three months into a new term (god forbid!) and has to be removed under the 25th amendment?

Other incidents over the past 6 months also reinforce this take that Trump is perhaps months from totally cratering.  Let's spotlight some of them:

During the last several months of Republican primaries, Trump repeatedly claimed that his opponent Nikki Haley was in charge of Capitol security on January 6. (Haley never had any connection to Capitol security.)

He has repeatedly confused who he ran against in the past, such as stating, “With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn’t be won.” (Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016.)

Trump has confused Biden with Obama so often that he’s had to put out a statement that the slips have been intentional.

Last September, Trump suggested that the way to prevent wildfires in California’s forest lands is to keep them damp. Here are his words:

They say that there’s so much water up north that I want to have the overflow areas go into your forests and dampen your forests, because if you dampen your forests you're not gonna have these forest fires that are burning at levels that nobody’s ever seen.”

In October, Trump warned his supporters that Biden will lead America into World War Two.

Trump has also claimed that whales are being killed by windmills. That he won all 50 states in 2020. That he defeated Barack Obama in 2016. That the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be executed.

Then in March we heard Trump babble:

They come out with faucets where no water comes out. You stand under a shower and you have to wait five times longer.

As Lawrence O'Donnell put it in a March ‘Last Word’ segment:

“What person with any sense remains under a shower when no water comes out?”

So we can agree that Trump is showing growing signs of dementia, specifically Alzheimer's, but isn’t facing nearly the same scrutiny as is Joe Biden. Why not? Because he basically got a pass with his debate performance,  using flood the zone with lies tactics that left Biden unable to respond coherently.  And this took place in front of 50 million people which started Biden’s polls going off a cliff. 

The media’s attitude, right or wrong, is that the post-debate polling confers an objective advantage on Trump.  This gives him a kind of  ‘benediction’ and protection from too harsh scrutiny or criticism.  Biden could have turned this around but his high profile debate failure cratered any hope, and we’ve no idea what he’d do in a new debate in September. Lastly, we have to thank Donna Jackson Nakagawa for her ground breaking work in the book, 'The Angel and the Assassin'  

on how microglial cells can be triggered into activity, get out of control and 'eat synapses'

 Also how these ‘play an important role in the pathological process of Alzheimer's disease, often leading to extremely aggressive displays as we've beheld in Trump. They are mainly involved in the uptake and clearance of amyloid-β (Aβ), as well as the formation of neuroinflammation. It's been found that overactivated microglia increase Aβ and Tau, and Aβ and Tau in turn act as activators of microglia.  These then 'go on the warpath' eating synapses and the ability to reason along with it.

Additionally, various cytokines and proteins, high cholesterol, and telomere shortening are all associated with microglia activation.  This can start early in life with severe stresses, in Trump's case perhaps being sent to military school as a teen.  This after his parents learned he was testing home-made switchblades on cats in his Queens neighborhood.  

Are voters really prepared to see how he will test his 'Project 2025' switchblade on our democracy if they vote him into power again?  

See Also:

by Robert Becker | July 10, 2024 - 5:48am | permalink

If senility rears its head, isn’t a decent, honorable guy duty-bound to come clean to avert mayhem?

Against the worst menace ever to our functional governance, shouldn’t Dems field the nominee most likely to banish the explicit threat – plus the nasty ideology of Trumpism? Shouldn’t what we all know about Biden in excruciating detail have some input as to the party’s nomination? Or should allegiance to a good and decent president trump, so to speak, widespread dread over a worst-case scenario?

High-risk, abnormal jeopardy calls for abnormal proposals, even turning away from an untested primary winner. When conditions and skill-sets change – and a hurricane looms, isn’t it prudent, if not rational to exit comfort levels and seize the best shot at success? I defy entrenched passivity or true believers in the face of calamity.

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