November 30th, 2009

Reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The fluid flowing into Alan Romatowski’s left arm for an hour could be a magical solution stopping his Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks or a drug that fails to live up to its promise or even a placebo without any chance of helping him.

Neither the 58-year-old former airline pilot nor anyone else in the room — his wife, his doctor or the clinical coordinator of UPMC’s Alzheimer Disease Research Center — knows what he’s getting as one of several thousand participants in a national study.

But Alan, one of the 10 percent of Alzheimer’s patients afflicted with the early-onset version of the disease before age 65, is hopeful. On a November morning, three years after showing dementia symptoms and two years after a devastating Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he has done well on a periodic test of his mental abilities.