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| Forget This Column | |||||||
| The quickly aging Gersh Kuntzman gives ‘Senior Moment’ a go and quizzes some Alzheimer’s experts | |||||||
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| Jan. 7 — Like most Americans, I am worried that I am losing my mind. I’m not talking figuratively. I mean literally losing my mind. |
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| LATELY, THE
MORE data I try to cram into my brain, the less actual information is
retained. Evidence of this shows up in unrelated places: the five minutes
it took for me to remember my locker combination at the gym the other day,
the sudden confusion about the meaning of a flashing “Walk” sign at an
intersection near my home, the inability to summon up the proper synonym
for “sloppy” while recently banging away on my soon-to-be-published,
semi-autobiographical, self-indulgent second novel. I’m only 36, but the writing is on the wall: I am moving inexorably from being a spry youth to sharing a VA hospital room with Ronald Reagan. So you can imagine my excitement when I opened the newspaper last month to find an ad for a product called “Senior Moment.” The ad featured a not-so-senior woman with a look of terror on her face that indicated that she had not merely forgotten some random fact, but that she had forgotten everything about herself: her name, her husband’s name, her address, her favorite place for pizza, her favorite color, her favorite Beatle. “You don’t have to be a senior to have a senior moment,” the ad said, adding that Senior Moment is an “advanced memory enhancing dietary supplement” that “helps overcome mild memory loss.” (By the way, these statements “have not been evaluated by the Food & Drug Administration,” according to the tiny type at the bottom of the page. “This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” In my condition, I considered that a minor detail.) A TV version of the ad opens with a close-up of an envelope that reads, “Happy Belated Birthday” and then pans back to show a mother and daughter having lunch. “I’m worried about her,” the mother says in an interior monologue. “She’s starting to forget things.” In case you’d forgotten that sentence, the daughter suddenly blurts out in a voice so halting that it seems she can barely remember the English language, “I can’t…seem to remember…anything these…days.” Her mother hands over a box of Senior Moment (which, like a drug pusher, or pharmaceutical sales person, she just happens to have handy). But the daughter’s linguistic shortcomings continue. “Sen…ior Mom…ment?” she stammers, as if the words are as obscure as “marcescent” or “trophallaxis.” “This isn’t one of those trendy herbal…” she continues, apparently forgetting that finishing sentences is a central hallmark of human linguistic communication. |
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| Like most
Americans, I am worried that I am losing my mind. I’m not talking
figuratively. I mean literally losing my mind. |
Her mother reassures her that Senior Moment is a safe “nutritional
supplement just for the brain.” Right on cue, the daughter remembers the
facial expression for pleasure. “With Senior Moment,” she grins, “I won’t
miss your birthday next year.” (Unless, of course, the medication is so
good that she remembers that she hates her drug-pushing mother.) Sure, the commercial is dogmatic and, worse, an unconvincing look at contemporary mother-daughter interactions, yet I could not resist its message: I needed to get my hands on some of this brain food … and quick! Vaguely recalling that there is a drugstore somewhere downtown from my apartment, I started walking and, sure enough, soon encountered a place where a month’s supply of Senior Moment could be had for a mere $20 (which I’d forgotten was a significant sum of money). I bought the capsules, but before beginning my new regimen, I did a little research on the makers of Senior Moment, a company called Nutramax. If you haven’t heard of Nutramax, you’re obviously not an owner of thoroughbred racehorses with knee problems. Nutramax is, after all, the maker of Cosequine, which is basically Senior Moment for horse cartilage. The Senior Moment package told me that the capsules contained 50 milligrams of “Cerebral phospholipids (from standardized porcine extract)” and 40 milligrams of “Docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) (from standardized algal oil extract).” DHA is an Omega-3 fatty acid that’s essential for brain function, but Senior Moment’s other ingredients — hydroxypropylmethylcellulose, ascorbic palmitate, tocopherols and propylene glycol — offered little clue as to what the medication could do for me. So, amazingly, I started taking the drug on faith. I say amazingly because I’m the kind of person who can’t believe in God because I can’t see Him. Yet here I was swallowing a month’s worth of pig juice with an algae chaser on faith. So, the big question: After taking Senior Moment for a month, was I ready to memorize the Gettysburg Address (“Eighty-seven years ago…”) or Kennedy’s famous Berlin speech (“Today, I am a jelly doughnut, but tomorrow I want to be one of those big beer steins”)? Not exactly. Senior Moment jump-started my brain about as well as a Kmart battery in a junked ’67 Chevy. An example? Near the end of my month on Senior Moment, I spent 10 minutes staring across a room at a good friend of mine whose name I could not for the life of me remember. And the only reason I remember the incident at all, is because I hurriedly wrote it down on a cocktail napkin (man, I’ve got to remember to work on my handwriting). And last week was a comedy of mental errors. In short order, I forgot the name of the new European currency (give me a hint), the name of New York City’s incoming mayor and the name of that movie I really like with veteran character actor Bruno Kirby in it (no, not “Spinal Tap,” the other one). |
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I even forgot
the name of our Treasury Secretary in the midst of an implosion of the
Argentine economy (although, in the end, I blamed Secretary Paul O’Neill,
not my addled brain, for the bout with forgetfulness. I mean, has that man
done anything since taking office?). Clearly, Senior Moment was a joke perpetrated on me and, more important, on NEWSWEEK’s expense-account department, which will soon be processing my $20 reimbursement claim. Then again, maybe I wasn’t being sufficiently scientific about all this; after all, a medical trial with only one subject would not pass muster with the boys at the FDA. So I called up David Shenk, author of “The Forgetting—Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic” (Doubleday). I vaguely remember that last fall Shenk’s brain book was becoming a runaway best seller, until the attacks on September 11 sent everyone rushing to the stores to buy Nostradamus biographies. Better yet, Shenk’s a neighbor of mine, which meant I only had to remember seven numbers rather than 10. “Everyone is afraid of Alzheimer’s, so it’s completely understandable that people would rush to buy supposed memory enhancers,” Shenk said. “But it’s just as understandable that companies will try to take advantage of people. The fact is, scientists say that there’s no evidence that products like Senior Moment do anything to enhance or protect memory.” Lots of good that did me. Fortunately, Shenk also had a theory on why we are all losing our minds. “We live in a complex world that’s smogged with data,” he said. “So everyone thinks he’s getting Alzheimer’s. But the fact is, we’re trying to keep track of more things and we have a higher expectation of memory retention because computer capabilities keep increasing. We are trying to remember data—phone numbers, credit card numbers, knowledge about events on the other side of the world—that simply did not exist a century ago. You can’t take a pill of Omega-3 fatty acids to overcome a distractive lifestyle.” I was becoming increasingly convinced that Shenk had drifted from discussing my defective memory to plugging a book he wrote a few years ago about information overload called “Data Smog,” so I called another brain expert, Dale Schenk (no, I am not losing my mind that quickly. Our nation has two Alzheimer’s experts and their last names sound exactly the same). I showed Schenk a bunch of studies that Nutramax had sent me, but he agreed with Shenk. “In studies like these, rats are typically denied all their natural DHA, which is then restored,” said Schenk, vice president of discovery research at Elan Corporation, which is working on a promising Alzheimer’s drug. “Sure, the rats who have their DHA restored perform better in cognitive tests, but that doesn’t prove anything except rats with better nutrition are healthier and more alert.” In the end, Schenk and Shenk said that the best treatment for a distressed brain is activity. “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” Schenk (not Shenk) said. I’ll try to remember that next time — you know, when I’m spending my own money instead of my magazine’s. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His website is at http://www.gersh.tv/ © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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Perspectives