Alzheimer's vs Cryonics

Once Alzheimer's starts, the damage it does to the victim's brain appears to be permanent. The information appears to be gone. Once your memories start to get wiped away, I don't think that there is any real way to get the information back, so whenever we do invent a cure for Alzheimer's, all it is likely to do is to stop the deterioration of your brain, not bring your lost memories back. If we could start growing new neurons, you could probably get your brain functioning back to normal, but I doubt you could get much else.

Both my grandparents have Alzheimer's, and the disease is at a rather late stage. They're gone. They don't remember me; they don't remember my mother; they barely even recognize each other, and they've been married over 50 years. Even if I got my hands on a cure for Alzheimer's disease tomorrow, they would "wake up" in 80+ year old bodies, with no memories of their children and grandchildren.

Given my own experience and knowledge of the disease, if I knew someone who had been diagnosed and was starting to show signs of the disease, I would recommend that they get themselves frozen as quickly as possible.

23andMe recently showed that people of my genotype are more than twice as likely to develop Alzheimer's as others in my ethnic group. I have a 15% chance of getting Alzheimer's before I'm 80, up from 7%. See Patri's post about this.

An initial Googling has generated things like 'eat paleo', 'get caffeine', 'exercise', and 'use your brain'. I'm planning to do further research about decreasing Alzheimer's risk.

I really recommend that everyone do 23andMe for this precise reason.

My priority would be to minimize damage, so as early as possible while still allowing for the least traumatic transition for family and friends. I expect it would be the same as dying suddenly: lots of paperwork to do, translating into stress added on top of grief.

Which, of course, is a strong argument for advance preparation.

The same applies for sudden death or severe illness. At 40 it's a bit early to be thinking a lot about this, but definitely coming up as a to-do item; I've just been reminded by Steel's The Procrastination Equation that this kind of planning is something many, many people procrastinate about (sometimes until death).

Would you avoid the risk of being frozen all together because you believe we will or may have a cure for Alzheimer's soon, and waiting for it would do less damage than cryonics?

Not in the current state of knowledge about the disease. Onset-to-death times are in the range of 5 to 8 years apparently, which is just barely enough time for a new cure to make it to widely available trials, not enough for it to be more than a very long shot. But in the meantime your personality would be slowly disintegrating; by the end of that period there wouldn't be much of a "you" to benefit from the cure.

If this happens, maybe a month to wrap up some affairs and then opt for live freezing to minimize brain damage. Unfortunately, I can't predict whether it would be legally simple to do so. If I am susceptible to some sort of neurodegenerative disease, the mean time of onset is probably ~02050 CE for me.

There is a growing interest of this issue in the cryonics community. For example, see this article in Cryonics magazine:

http://www.alcor.org/magazine/2011/01/14/options-for-brain-threatening-disorders/

Memories are very important, but they're only part of the package. Personality matters as much or more. I think the right answer would be to kill yourself once the degradation has erased most of your memories but your personality is still mostly untouched.

If you are revived, a lot of memories can be created out of all your documented evidence and buried (but nano-accessible) memories; this is especially true if you were smart enough to start lifelogging early - then you can retrieve a great many memories just by replaying the video stream and crosschecking your reactions against the videoed reactions and documentation like emails or social network updates.

This would represent a tradeoff between the 'alpha' and 'beta' simulation strategies, but that makes sense, since deciding when to kill yourself with Alzheimer's is another tradeoff between highly certain life and highly uncertain revival.

Were I to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I would purchase some hemlock. At that point, you might as well try to be frozen.