When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (25 page)

Magda, the New York physician, has dealt with her debilitating abdominal pains by working out her repressed rage through psychotherapy. She has also entered a profession more suited to her inclinations and personality. “Being in pain 80 per cent of the time disappeared a long time ago,” she says. “In the past two or three months, there has been even further improvement. Recently I cleaned out the fridge in my office, where I have a bottle of Bentylol [a medication to relieve spasms of the intestines]. I honestly can’t remember when I took the last one. It would be quite a few months ago.”

Fiona decided to take the warnings of her abdominal pain to heart. She left her husband when it became clear that he was unwilling to give up his drug addiction. With her two children, she has moved to a new town and filed for divorce. She is no longer experiencing pain.

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LZHEIMER’S DISEASE IS BECOMING
the baby boomers’ nightmare. Affluence and advanced medical care will ensure that the cohort now entering ripe middle age will live longer than any comparable group in history—and will see more of its members slide into dementia than any previous generation. The number of elderly Canadians is predicted to increase by 50 per cent in the next half century. About 100,000 people die of Alzheimer’s annually in the United States, where in 1999 there were estimated to be four million people with the disease. That latter statistic is expected to reach fifteen million in 2050, if present trends continue.

Conditions that lead people to be demented—literally, “out of mind”—become more common as we get older. Three per cent of seventy-year-olds suffer from Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia; by age seventy-seven, the figure rises to 13 per cent. The financial costs are enormous, as is the physical and emotional burden on caregivers. And how can those of sound mind imagine the suffering experienced by someone who helplessly witnesses his memory, his intellect, his very self dissolve into infantile chaos? Gradually comes the loss of control over emotional expression, speech and bodily functions until, if the disease runs its natural course, immobility and death follow.

“This is the worst thing that can happen to a thinking person,” a person with Alzhemier’s said. “You can feel yourself, your whole inside
and outside, break down.” The patient was talking to David Shenk, author of
The Forgetting
, an illuminating book on the history of Alzheimer’s disease.

Shenk also quotes Jonathan Swift. The seventeenth-century Irish writer, satirist and wit was an intellectual giant reduced in his last years to being a mental Lilliputian, his memory failing, his thoughts disordered. “I neither read nor write, nor remember nor converse,” Swift lamented in a letter composed during the early phases of his dementia. In another, he said that he could “hardly write 10 lines without blunders, as you will see by the numbers of scratchings and blots before this letter is done. Into the bargain, I have not one rag of memory.”

One of the first structures to deteriorate in Alzheimer’s is the hippocampus, a centre of grey matter in the temporal lobe of the brain, located on either side next to the ears. The hippocampus is active in memory formation and has an important function in stress regulation. It is well known that chronically high levels of the stress hormone cortisol can shrink the hippocampus.

Could early life experience, emotional repression and lifelong stress predispose to Alzheimer’s? Scientific research indicates so, as does a close look at the lives of people with Alzheimer’s—whether common folk or the famous, like Swift or the former U.S. president Ronald Reagan. An interesting clue that early relationships may be crucial in the later development of dementia comes from animal experimentation. Rats who receive gentle handling in infancy suffer virtually no loss of hippocampal cells in advanced age.
¹
Their capacity to remember remains intact. By comparison, non-handled rats are more likely to suffer shrinkage of the hippocampus and also exhibit greater memory impairment in old age.

In humans, the widely reported Nun Study found that low linguistic ability in early life had a strong association with dementia and premature death in late life. The retrospective research examined the handwritten autobiographies of a group of young postulants (candidate nuns), completed during their first year in the convent. Their mean age at the time of writing was twenty-three. More than six decades later, researchers asked to see the autobiographical statements each had made, and in addition, these now aged nuns were examined for mental health and acuity. As part of the study, each nun was asked and gave permission for an autopsy to be performed after her death. It turned out that those
who had expressed a paucity of ideas and had used less vivid language in their youthful memoirs were proportionately more likely to have developed clinical Alzheimer’s as they grew older, along with the characteristic pathological findings in the brain.
²

Richness or poverty of language is determined by many factors, but dominant among them is the quality of early emotional relationships. The author of the world classic
Gulliver’s Travels
hardly appears to have been deprived of linguistic capacity. On a closer look, Jonathan Swift’s life and writing both manifest a poverty of felt emotional experience and of
direct
emotional expression. His phenomenal powers were largely confined to intellectual ideas and to an acerbic wit so dry that his humour often escaped less sophisticated readers. As we saw with Gilda Radner, wit can be a coping style that blocks conscious emotional pain, camouflages anger and provides a means of gaining acceptance by others.

We can infer the intensely negative emotions agitating Swift, particularly his rage toward women, from the passive-aggressive style of his irreverent satire and from some crudely descriptive passages in his narratives. Swift conjures one of the most physically revolting experiences to befall Gulliver when he has him encounter a female breast in Brobdingnag, the land of giants. In this scene Gulliver observes a wet nurse suckling an infant. “I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with…. It stood prominent six Foot, and could not be less than sixteen in Circumference. The Nipple was about half the Bigness of my Head, and the Hue both of that and the Dug so varified with Spots, Pimples and Freckles, that nothing could appear more nauseous.”

We understand this disturbing account on a deeper level when we learn that Swift suffered a grievous emotional hurt in infancy, one that he later attributed to his nurse. Swift’s father, also named Jonathan, died seven months before his first and only son’s birth. When only a year old, Jonathan was separated from his mother, Abigaile. He was not to see her for years. In an autobiographical fragment, Swift claims that the nurse abducted him, but to some biographers that sounds like “a comforting fable.” More likely he was abandoned, since, after a brief reunion, his mother left him once more.

Gulliver’s encounter with that monstrous breast no doubt represents an intrinsic emotional memory. Here we are faced with the infant
Jonathan’s despair and anger at the sudden absence of his mother, who—in the infant’s preverbal perception—was unaccountably replaced by the detestable nurse and her abhorrent dug.

Jonathan was twenty years old before he met his mother again; it was a meeting he initiated. In a manner often seen in the emotionally repressed, he idealized his mother’s memory despite that minimal relationship. In the eulogy he wrote for her, he said, “If the way to Heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and charity, she is there.”

Swift’s long-repressed anger toward his mother would erupt later not only in misogynistic writings but also in his relationships with women. Toward them he would display a “cold, inexpressive anger,” or even physical violence. Sexually he was repressed. A recent biographer, Victoria Glendinning, writes, “With women who were closer to him, the permafrost of the emotions was maintained. A thaw cannot be risked. No one must have power over him—the power to melt self-possession, the power to hurt…. The only possible emotional outlets are limited, unthreatening ones with powerless and submissive women.”
³

Swift’s lifelong abhorrence of intimacy and his underlying fear of emotional contact or vulnerability are the defensive responses of a child deprived of emotional nurturing, a child who had to learn quickly to fend for himself. “There was, it seems, no one adult who particularly cared for Jonathan, or for whom he particularly cared.”

In some highly sensitive individuals there may arise an uncanny prescience of deeply hidden processes at work in the body/mind. We have noted this before, with the cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the dancer Joanne who died of ALS. Thirteen years before his death, while still in good health, Swift predicted his dementia. He wrote in
Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift:

He expressed the same premonition on a walk with a friend, seeing a decaying tree: “I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top.”

Swift died at age sixty-seven, in his time a fairly advanced age. His last years were an inexorable descent into dementia. Even toward the end, he was capable of uttering poignant wisdom—if only unconsciously, by rote. Glendinning writes: “One day during the sad last months—it was Sunday, 17 March 1744—sitting in his chair, he put out his hand to snatch at a knife lying on the table. Anne Ridgeway moved it out of his reach. He shrugged his shoulders, and rocked himself, and said, ‘I am what I am.’ He repeated the words, ‘I am what I am. I am what I am.’”

From diagnosis to death, life expectancy in Alzheimer’s averages eight years, regardless of the age when the disease first strikes. In rare instances, that may be as early as the sixth decade. Such was the case of Frau Auguste D., a fifty-one-year-old woman admitted to a Frankfurt psychiatric hospital in 1901 with a history of unexplainable behavioural quirks, emotional outbursts and memory lapses. Her course of irreversible mental and physical debility culminated in her death four years later. There was no known diagnosis, but posthumously, Frau D.’s condition came to bear the name of her psychiatrist, the brilliant Alois Alzheimer.

Although Frau D.’s deterioration mimicked senile dementia, which was previously thought to be a normal, if unfortunate, consequence of aging, his patient’s relatively young age suggested to Alzheimer that she had a yet-unidentified disease process. The new laboratory techniques of the time made possible a post-mortem examination of Frau D.’s brain, yielding what are now recognized as the hallmarks of the diagnosis: pathological changes in brain tissue specific to this disease. Normal nerve fibres are obliterated, replaced by tangles of strange strands called
fibrils
and by plaques, which David Shenk describes as “crusty brown lumps … a hodgepodge of granules and short, crooked threads, as if they were sticky magnets for microscopic trash.”
⁴

Following on Alzheimer’s pioneering work, we now know dementia is not an inexorable part of getting older but always represents disease. Various theories have been floated to explain the cause of Alzheimer’s, but so far none of them have been convincing. Some years ago, the finding that the Alzheimer’s-affected brain contains higher than normal levels of aluminum prompted many people to discard their aluminum utensils in
the hope of warding off the disease. Only later was it recognized that the presence of this metal in the brain was a consequence of the degenerative process, not the cause of it. Even more intriguing, tangles and plaques have been found in the brains of people who, during life, exhibited no signs at all of suffering from Alzheimer’s. (Recall that we have seen analogous findings of cancer cells in the breasts of women who had no clinical malignancy, or in the prostates of men dying in healthy old age.) A most telling example came in the recently concluded study of nuns and Alzheimer’s disease. “Sister Mary, the gold standard for the Nun Study, was a remarkable woman who had high cognitive test scores before her death at 101 years of age. What is more remarkable is that she maintained this high status despite having abundant neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques, the classic lesions of Alzheimer’s disease.”
⁵

An international scientific consensus is steadily gaining ground that points to Alzheimer’s as one of the diseases on the spectrum of autoimmune conditions, along with multiple sclerosis, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis and many others. Again, these are the diseases in which the body’s immune system turns against the self. In autoimmune illness, there is blurring between what is self and
non-self—-
foreign matter to be attacked.

“Autoimmune aggression” is how Russian researchers recently characterized the pathological process in Alzheimer’s.
⁶
Canadian physicians have found a higher incidence of other autoimmune illnesses in the families of Alzheimer’s patients, suggesting a common predisposition.
⁷
The inflammation of brain tissue in Alzheimer’s—called
inflamm-aging
by a group of Italian scientists—has been successfully slowed by the same anti-inflammatory drugs employed in the treatment of arthritis. Spanish invesigators have found immune-system components, including specialized immune cells and chemicals, in the brain tissue of affected patients.
⁸
Scientists have identified unique anti-brain antibodies manufactured by the confused immune system. According to Austrian researchers, “There is little doubt that the immune system plays a role in the neurodegenerative process in Alzheimer’s disease.”
⁹

The autoimmune diseases all entail imbalances in the body’s physiological stress-regulation system, in particular the hormonal cascade set off by the hypothalamus. This surge of hormones culminates in the release of cortisol and adrenalin by the adrenal glands. Many studies
have shown dysregulated physiological stress responses in Alzheimer’s, including abnormal production of hypothalamic and pituitary hormones and cortisol. In human beings with Alzheimer’s and in animal models of dementia, there is excessive production of cortisol, which is paralleled by the degree of damage to the hippocampus.