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TreasureKY -> RE: Reagan had Alzheimers while in office (1/15/2011 5:37:16 PM)
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*yawn* Reposted from over two years ago...
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ORIGINAL: TreasureKY
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ORIGINAL: bipolarber
Was that the same Reagan who had Alzheimers the last few years of his presidency? The guy that several of his cabinent have described as "not really there" during major talks about arms reduction teaties?
Just checking...
President Reagan was 77 years old when he left office in 1989. It was five years later, in 1994, when he disclosed that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It was a further ten years after that before he passed away from pneumonia.
Considering the clinical stages of Alheimer's and that studies indicate that a typical 70 year old American man newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s has a life expectancy of 4.4 years, it's doubtful that President Reagan was suffering severe "not really there" symptoms of Alzheimer’s while in office fifteen years prior to his death.
Edited to add:
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Did Reagan have Alzheimer's disease in office?
Yes and no. Without a doubt, he was on his way to getting the disease, which develops over many years. But it is equally clear that there was not yet nearly enough decline in function to support even a tentative diagnosis. Reagan's mind was well within the realm of normal functioning. Even if his doctors had been looking intently for Alzheimer's, it is still likely that they would not have been able to detect the disease-in-progress.
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How do you feel Mr. Reagan's Alzheimer's impacted his ability to perform his duty towards the end of his presidency?
"There is no evidence that Reagan had Alzheimer's Disease during his presidency. When he made his public announcement about the diseases in 1994, many of his critics exchanged meaningful glances, as if to say, "We knew he had it all along." And there are times toward the end of Reagan's presidency when he seemed forgetful. But these were probably due to the natural effects of the aging process. Remember that Reagan was 55 years old when he first ran for political office and 69 when he was elected president in 1980. Moreover, few people have more regular medical examinations than presidents and the various doctors who checked Reagan out thoroughly found no evidence of Alzheimer's Disease during his presidential tenure."
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Just when the Alzheimer's began can never be known. But while the line between mere forgetfulness and the beginning of Alzheimer's can be fuzzy, a matter of gradation, Mr. Reagan's four main White House doctors say they saw no evidence that he had crossed it as President. They saw and spoke with him daily in the White House, they said, and beyond the natural failings of age never found his memory, reasoning or judgment to be significantly impaired.
Mr. Reagan ''absolutely'' did not ''show any signs of dementia or Alzheimer's,'' said Dr. John E. Hutton Jr., who cared for him from 1984 until the end of his Presidency and remains a close family friend. Extensive mental-status tests did not indicate evidence of Alzheimer's until 1993, more than four years after Mr. Reagan left office, Dr. Hutton said.
Even in hindsight, Mr. Reagan's friends and former aides said that they, too, had seen no hint of the deterioration to come. And while they acknowledged that he had occasional memory lapses as President, especially when it came to names, many said he had had these problems for years, certainly since he was Governor of California, from 1967 to 1974.
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Did Ronald Reagan have Alzheimer’s Disease while he was President?
Dr Larry Altman, who was a Senior Medical columnist for the New York Times, once looked into this question and was…
“…unable to find any evidence by any medical criteria that is known to the medical profession that Mr Regan had any symptoms or signs of Alzheimer’s when he was President.”
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Norman Swan: Fine. Now you've looked at the health of Ronald Reagan in some depth; what did you discover when you looked at it?
Larry Altman: I was unable to find any evidence by any medical criteria that is known to the medical profession that Mr Regan had any symptoms or signs of Alzheimer's when he was President. The signs and symptoms developed several years after he left office, but interviews with senior Cabinet officials in his last term, with his doctors who treated him on a regular basis, and other people who knew him, could turn up no evidence that there was any incidence or incidents that suggested that he had Alzheimer's. And even his biographer didn't find any evidence of it.
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