Jennie Smith in Science:
Robin Richards Donohoe, a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley, remembers 2005 as the year her charming, outgoing mother, Alice, “just went mute.”
Alice Richards was a born communicator, a journalism major, and mother of seven who, as her husband’s company helped bring electricity to the rural South, threw her energies into countless civic and philanthropic causes. She could give a stirring speech, her family members recall. But as Alice entered her 70s, her words began to slip away.
Like her father and sister before her, Alice had been struck with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Fast-progressing and fatal, this deterioration in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease in people younger than 65. About 40% of cases are caused by known inherited genetic mutations. In 2006, mutations in GRN, a gene that codes for a protein called progranulin, were found to be a major cause of familial FTD. Alice and her relatives, it turned out, had one of them.
More here.
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