It's like, what do you mean if something's wrong with me? So how do you kind of bridge that, you know, that sort of initial resistance that I imagine a lot of people would have? Well, I think

would be to kind of take the reins and make an appointment for your loved one to be assessed by their physician and, you know, make sure that You cite examples of things that you have personally witnessed and things that you're concerned about.

And this is the reason why these situations can become so extreme and so catastrophic, especially with Alzheimer's disease, because the first part of the brain that the disease starts to damage and attacks is our short-term memory with Alzheimer's disease.

It's the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease, where some of the other brain diseases that we know about attack other parts of the brain.

But short-term memory decline is the hallmark of Alzheimer's.

And what tends to happen, and this is really important for people to be aware of, and why it presents such a dangerous situation for communities and the people who are living with this disease, is because by the time we progress to about the mid-stage, our short-term memory is kind of malfunctioning.

And short-circuiting, if you will.

with diet, with exercise, with medications.

So Lisa, what's the biggest takeaway you would hope that our listeners will be left with by the end of this conversation?

Well, to your point, there's two things.

We are actually being told by the World Health Organization and the Alzheimer's associations that if a cure or a treatment is not found just by the year 2050, which if we, you know, do the math, is 24 short years away, the number of people who are expected to develop Alzheimer's disease is going to triple from the number of people who live with it today.

And currently in the world, there are close to 14 million people living with Alzheimer's disease.

It's the fifth-leading cause of death in the elderly in the US, but in the UK, in Finland, in the Netherlands, right now it's the number one cause of death in the elderly population.

So it's a worldwide global crisis that we all need to prepare ourselves for.

We're not close to a cure.And we're not even really close to a viable treatment that could slow down the progression or help with some of the cognitive decline that we see during the progression of the disease.

Wow.