In ancient times, did Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of age-related dementia exist? This is a question that some thinkers contemporaries with Aristotle or Hippocrates had to debate.
As part of a recently published study Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) analyzed ancient medical records and found that there are very few mentions of age-related forms of dementia, suggesting that these pathologies are the result of our modern lifestyle.
A very rare mention of memory loss
“The ancient Greeks had very few – but we found – mentions of anything that might look like a mild cognitive deficit,” said Professor Caleb Finch, a university professor at the School of Medicine. Leonard Davis, a gerontologist at USC, and lead author Bhantar. “When we went to the Romans, we found at least four statements that indicated rare cases of advanced dementia, but we couldn’t say it was Alzheimer’s disease. So there was a progression (of these diseases) from the ancient Greeks to the Romans.
Professor Finch and Stanley Burstein, a historian at California State University, Los Angeles, studied ancient medical writings by Hippocrates and his followers. A valuable document that lists the pathologies affecting old people at the time, such as deafness, vertigo or even digestive disorders, but which makes no mention of memory loss. According to studied medical records, the ancient Greeks observed that aging usually leads to mild cognitive impairment. The disorders, however, are incomparable with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, causing major loss of memory, speech and reasoning.
A few centuries later, during the time of ancient Rome, some more serious cases of dementia were reported. In the 1st century, Pliny the Elder noted that the senator Valerius Messala Corvinus had forgotten his name. In the following century, Claude Gallion, a Greek doctor who treated several Roman emperors, noted that some people over the age of 80 had difficulty acquiring new knowledge.
Sedentary lifestyles and pollution are involved
To explain this slow progression of various forms of dementia during antiquity, the authors of the study developed a theory: in ancient Rome, the densification of imperial cities led to increased pollution, increasing cases of cognitive decline. Pollution increased tenfold with the use of a powerful pollutant among the Roman aristocracy: lead. Wealthy Romans of the time had lead water pipes, and they added lead acetate, or Saturn sugar—a highly toxic chemical compound in white powder form—to their wine to sweeten it. – poisoned himself without knowing it.
Lacking demographic data from ancient Greece and Rome, the authors sought a similar contemporary model. Thus they studied the indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, today’s Simane Amerindians. People who still live pre-industrial lifestyles today, who are very physically active, and who have particularly low rates of dementia: less than 1% of the population, reports USC, compared with more than 11%, according to the Alzheimer’s Association. According, 65 years in the United States. “This is the best documentation of a large population of older people with mild dementia, showing that the environment is a major determinant of dementia risk,” says Professor Finch. The enlightening results, however, should be taken with a grain of salt: if ancient Greece and Rome had famous elders over 80 years old, life expectancy at that time did not allow many people to reach 80 years or even 65 years. .
The World Health Organization (WHO) recalls that today, “more than 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia. And about 10 million new cases are reported every year. Dementia results from various diseases and injuries affecting the brain. And Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of cases.” In France, “almost one million people are affected by Alzheimer’s disease, or 8% of people over 65 years of age,” according to the Vancry Alzheimer Foundation. And in France, about 225,000 new cases are diagnosed each year.
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