Alzheimer’s disease has killed at least three women in Astrida Schaeffer’s family over two generations, leaving her feeling helpless and bereft.
The first was her Polish-born maternal grandmother, who began showing symptoms when Schaeffer started college in 1981 and died seven years later. Then came her mother, a onetime Fulbright Scholar and high school language teacher who had been fluent in five languages but lost the ability to speak. She died in 2019. Last year, the disease killed Schaeffer’s mother’s sister, a former lab technician for Johnson & Johnson.
Schaeffer, a 59-year-old costume historian in North Berwick, Maine, has no symptoms of Alzheimer’s. But in 2021 her family history led her to apply to join a clinical trial testing a drug on people at risk for developing them. To participate, volunteers couldn’t have cognitive impairment. But they needed to test positive for a biomarker that put them at higher risk for mental decline ― deposits of a sticky toxic protein in the brain called beta-amyloid that is a hallmark of the disease.