Linkletter Addresses Alzheimer’s Meeting
He joked about his age and how he often forgets names, including that of “whatever her name is”--his wife.
But all jesting aside, 77-year-old television personality Art Linkletter came to a daylong medical symposium here Tuesday to discuss a serious subject--Alzheimer’s disease--and the need to find a cure for “this dreadful scourge.”
He gave the keynote address, telling 100 neurobiologists, doctors, nurses and relatives of Alzheimer’s victims who gathered at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Science and Engineering that Alzheimer’s “is one of those terrible things that happens.”
“No matter how hard you work, no matter how hard you take care of yourself,” the disease can progress relentlessly from confusion to dementia to death, Linkletter said.
For all Linkletter’s jokes about memory loss, he at least was healthy, he said; he surfs in summer and skis in winter and was clearly still on top of his game as a humorist.
But Alzheimer’s affected Linkletter deeply several years ago when a good friend, UCLA brain researcher John Douglas French, died of the disease.
Linkletter touched briefly on the pain of French’s death, describing the ultimate irony that “the man who spent his life on the mysteries of the brain died because of a disease of the brain.”
After that death, Linkletter became chairman of a West Los Angeles foundation named after French, which has raised more than $5 million for Alzheimer’s research.
Some of the $2.5 million in grants so far has gone to several of Tuesday’s speakers: to UC Irvine psychobiologists Carl Cotman and Christine Peterson and to psychiatrist Stephen Read, medical director of a Los Alamitos nursing home for Alzheimer’s patients.
For all the promising research, Linkletter still called dealing with Alzheimer’s “a frustrating business--with no known cure, no known cause and it keeps increasing by leaps and bounds.”
In Orange County, an estimated 40,000 people have Alzheimer’s, said a spokeswoman for the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County, a support group for patients and their families.
Nationwide, more than 4 million people are said to have the disease, but Linkletter estimated “there are several more millions hidden--because families do what they did with madness and leper’s disease earlier,” keeping the victims out of sight.
Tuesday’s symposium, “Alzheimer’s Disease: Recent Insights and Developments in Research,” was sponsored by UC Irvine, the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County and the John Douglas French Center for Alzheimer’s Disease.
