Danny George: Rethinking Alzheimer’s Disease

by John Hopkins

It takes an uncommon degree of confidence and perhaps a touch of innocence for a 22-year-old with a newly minted bachelor’s degree in English to walk unannounced into the office of one of the nation’s foremost geriatric neurologists and ask if the doctor is in.

And when it turns out he’s not, only the most self-assured young man would slip a copy of his senior Independent Study project on the therapeutic uses of narrative in treating patients with Alzheimer’s disease under the physician’s door.

Three years ago, Danny George ’04 did just that, and in January, St. Martin’s Press will publish The Myth of Alzheimer’s: What You Aren’t Being Told About Today’s Most Dreaded Diagnosis, by Peter J. Whitehouse, M.D., Ph.D., with Daniel George, M.Sc.

Danny George The book’s thesis is simple. What we call Alzheimer’s is not a specific brain disease at all. “It can neither be diagnosed definitively in life nor death and does not have one basic defining pathological feature,” says Whitehouse, who directs the Memory and Aging Center at Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals. After almost 30 years as a researcher and clinician, he has come to believe that the Alzheimer’s label instead “represents our culture’s attempt to make sense of a natural process, brain aging, that we cannot control.” This, he believes, has led to a misbegotten emphasis on finding a “cure” for the effects of brain aging, rather than on prevention and care, especially non-pharmacological ways of enhancing an aging patient’s quality of life.

This shift in thinking was already complete when Whitehouse met George three years ago, but Whitehouse was eager to share his insights with a broader audience than the researchers and physicians for whom he has written hundreds of scholarly articles. After initially hiring him as a research assistant, Whitehouse was sufficiently impressed with George’s skills as a writer, editor, and critical thinker to ask him to collaborate on a book that he called, somewhat facetiously, “part memoir, part exposé.”

They set to work in early 2005 and completed the first few chapters before George left for Oxford to begin working on a master’s in medical anthropology. Thereafter, they collaborated long-distance. For each chapter, George would interview Whitehouse and write a first draft, which would then go through a series of trans-Atlantic revisions.

George often found himself testing ideas from the book with a diverse group of fellow graduate students, from neurologists and molecular geneticists to political scientists, in one of Oxford’s pubs. The experience reminded him of his undergraduate days.

“One of the things I loved at Wooster was when things overlapped, when something from religion class spilled over into economics.” That sort of cognitive blending, he says, proved to be excellent preparation for the intellectual foment of Oxford.

With the book and his master’s both complete, George is back in Shaker Heights, working at the Memory and Aging Center, collecting data on whether intergenerational volunteer activities promote a higher quality of life for Alzheimer’s patients. He plans to return to Oxford in May to write his doctoral thesis on the findings.

Meanwhile, he has been helping Whitehouse promote the ideas behind The Myth of Alzheimer’s. In October, he traveled to Caracas, Venezuela, to make a presentation at an international conference on Alzheimer’s. He and Whitehouse will attend an AARP meeting when the book arrives in stores. Other events are planned for New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida.

It is unusual to have a co-author as young as George, says Whitehouse. “I was surprised to find someone like Danny at a level of maturity where he could really help me.”

In addition to valuing George’s intelligence and writing skills, Whitehouse says he also admires his character. “Danny has a very well developed sense of what his values are and who he is that’s really remarkable for one his age.”