“The price of Memory”

What if I woke up one day and then I cannot remember what happen yesterday? What if I cannot recall the names of my parents and other significant people in my life? Then, even if I will look at some photographs, I cannot make sense of what I saw? Nothing comes back to me. I suffered memory loss. These are the things that comes to my mind while listening to a series of lectures about the causes and effects of dementia to a person during the 2nd ADAP National Congress on Dementia Prevention last September 18 to 21, 2008 at Manila Hotel and the battle cry is “Ayaw naming Makalimot”.



In my own a opinion, for a person to live normally we must have a good memory because this will give us meaning to our daily existence but when facts are presented how problems of dementia affected several people. I think the statistics are quite alarming. It was projected that in 2110 Most Older adults sixty-two years in above have fear of losing their mental capacity. In the lecture of Ma. Socorro C. Martinez – President of ADAP (Adult Cognitive Health Initiative) entitled “Dementia on the Rise; No time to lose”. She mentioned that 60% of people with dementia live in the developing country and there is 24.3 million suffering Dementia and 4.6 million are new cases. In Asia Pacific it is estimated that 13.6 million suffered dementia as of 2005 and in the Philippines it was estimated that 11.5% older adults have dementia. She also presented in her lecture about Policy Changes and Framework in order to address this sickness and here’s her findings: Limited Awareness on Dementia since many were not aware about the disease, Dementia is natural part of aging so there are no enabling laws in order to address the disease, Inadequate Human and Financial Resources to address the disease and Inadequate Training for Professional Care givers and Lack of Support of Family Care givers.



But what is dementia? In a lay man’s term we call it “pagkaulyanin” in Tagalog or “Gi-ango-ango” in Bisaya” but these are discriminatory terms to aged people since we are thinking that growing old also means that we are progressing into memory loss. It is only quite accepted in developing countries because in western societies normally when people grow older their memory becomes even sharper and vivid. No wonder at the age of sixty many of them can write a book or become specialist in their own field but in our country older person will end up idle for their children to be taken cared off as they become dependent to their children. When I visited Golden Acres before most social workers are having difficulty working with their clients because many of them cannot provide actual information and this leave them dependent to the welfare institution until they die.





As I’ve learned from the conference Dementia refers to a complete memory loss but primary cause of the disease was still quite unknown. It was introduced by Dr. Alzheimer from Germany. According to various medical experts during the conference the disease was attributed to a poor cognitive function and even related to the problems of diabetes and hypertension. If a person suffered hypertension then there is a tendency that he or she will develop dementia in later part of life. Dr. Peter Rabin from University of Chicago stressed out the importance of prevention to address dementia. He highlighted in his lecture about the value of exercise especially aerobic exercise that can really help in preventing the disease and also a continuous education because in his studies conducted it was found out that it is hard to detect dementia among people who are continuously educated.



Given all these facts and information from various experts we can make conclusions that those people living below poverty line are also mostly the projected victims of the disease. Since in the Philippines 70% of the Filipinos are poor so we can anticipate that there will more people who will eventually suffered this disease since many were suffering diabetes, hypertension and added by poor education and lack of exercise. As presented by various studies during the conference, Alzheimer’s disease was one of the top ten leading causes of death in the country.



Questions now need to be addressed like how are giving attentions to this disease? What are our preventive measures? What Social Security or safety nets of the government to support patient with Dementia? How ready is Social Security System or Government Insurance System for Dementia? How we address the social effects of dementia in our society?



On my personal reflection, I am sad that if we cannot prevent dementia, time will come that we cannot remember anything. I think that another most beautiful thing God gives to us humans is our memory but if we lose it then what makes us differ with the lower species? Is it not good that when we grow older we can tell stories to our children how we live our lives before and give them insights on what can they do to the present. Having such photographic memory is essential and so we have to work hard to preserve it now prior to losing it in the end.