VOL. 7 ISSUE 25 • SUNDAY-MONDAY, APRIL 20-21, 2014
www.edgedavao.net
P 15.00 • 20 PAGES
EDGEDAVAO Serving a seamless society
•MCI • Alzheimer’s disease • Dementia
Dreadful forgetfulness By Antonio M. Ajero ajero_antonio@yahoo.com
Healthy Brain
A
proMinent lawyer, who had been disbarred, goes out of his home purportedly for a morning walk around the subdivision. He gives money to everyone he meets along the way and has a difficult time finding his way back home. A rich scion of a landed gentry and one of the original members of the elite Hijos de Davao, has difficulty recognizing his relatives and friends. Instead, he demands from them payment of non-existent debts. A former city press secretary, who was known to be an erudite speechwriter and hardhitting columnist, accused his sons and daughters of plotting to kill him by tricking him to take a helicopter ride with his eldest son, who would throw him out of the chopper somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A widow of an assistant city treasurer, when still alive, often visited city hall to demand that she be given the unpaid financial benefits due her for her late husband. She would not listen to her grown-up children that she had been long paid the benefits. Another widow, this time, wife of a late lawyer who was once a city councilor, would storm the city mayor’s office and stun the newly-elected mayor with a claim that her family owned the land where the city hall building stands. She would then asked the newly assumed city adminis-
Demented Brain tration to get ready to vacate the area as her family would now use the property. I know all five above-said ladies and gentlemen. I felt the warmth of their handshakes everytime we met, saw them smile and wave their hands in friendship to me. However, I will not tell you their names. There’s no point, unless I want to satisfy your curiousity and earn libel cases from their embarrassed families. I can tell you this much, though – they’re good persons, but they suffered, or are suffering from varying degrees of either MCI (mild cognitive impairment), dementia, or Alzheimer’s disease. Before science discovered these maladies and assigned them names, we, laymen, knew them simply to be forgetfulness. Dr. Marcos Ong, a prominent neurologist in Davao, gave us, members of the Ambassador Club Davao (ACD) and guests, an enlightening lecture on these afflictions during our general membership meeting at the Marco Polo Davao last March 28. Mild cognitive impairment (MCi) MCI causes a slight decline in a person’s cognitive ability, including memory and thinking skills. MCI puts a person at increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia. MCi causes and risks It is said that the causes of MCI are not yet completely understood, but many experts be-
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