Posted on Professor Ian McKeith, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at Newcastle University’s Institute for Ageing discusses Lewy Body Dementia in an article about Catherine Deveney’s book, “The Chrysalis”.
Lewy body drug trials offer hope of a key to one type of human prison. “We have to be realistic,” says McKeith, “and it will take time. It’s not going to be simple. But I’m very optimistic for the future. Lewy body dementia was only accepted in DSM-V, an American diagnostic manual that McKeith calls “the recipe book” of illnesses, in 2013, and drug companies are now becoming interested. McKeith is chief investigator in a major drug trial in the UK, to be completed by October this year, evaluating a new compound called Intepirdine for the treatment of Lewy body dementias.
The author describes her mother’s journey living with the condition.
“Basically a love story, the book deals with the subject of transgenderism, but the main character has dementia. Perhaps the point was that we are all trapped in various human conditions, whether gender or old age or illness. Catherine continues: “So many things remind me of my mother. Yellow roses. Black Magic chocolates. Marks and Spencer shirtwaister dresses. (“Give us a twirl!” my dad used to say, and she invariably obliged with a Moll flourish.) Where did it go, that spirit? It left a long time before she did, her body shuffling on, inhabited by an impostor who merely resembled her.”
