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CNN
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Alzheimer’s disease is becoming increasingly widespread and finds more than 55 million people worldwide – a figure that is expected to triple in 2050.
Despite the prevalence of the disease, few have the history of research into Alzheimer’s and the role that is played by an important but long overlooked figure: Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller, the first black psychiatrist and neurologist in the United States.
Fuller’s work “not only promoted the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, but was also an example of how different backgrounds and perspectives in medical research can stimulate scientific progress and improve patient care in different communities,” said Dr. Chantale Branson, university teacher Neurology at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta.
Fuller was born on August 11, 1872 in Monrovia, Liberia, from Solomon Fuller, a coffee planter and local government official, and Anna Ursula James. His father’s grandparents were previously slaved in Virginia before bought their freedom and then emigrated to Liberia in 1852.
There, the couple helped set up a scheme for other liberated African or African -American people. His mother’s grandparents were medical missionaries in Liberia and helped to ignite fuller’s interest in medicine, said Branson.
That curiosity led a 17-year-old fuller to move to the US, where he went to Livingstone College in North Carolina. According to the university, he studied medicines at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn and obtained a medical degree at Boston University. Exploring Boston a few years earlier, Branson said, had entered the institution fuller and the managers asked him to accept him as a medical student.
During a time of segregation that was only 34 years old since the emancipation, but still almost 70 before the Civil Rights Act, Fuller’s prevailing and acquiring his doctor is a remarkable achievement.
But Fuller ‘was really one of those people who did not accept’ no ‘for an answer, “Branson reminded himself from a conversation she had with one of his family members a few years ago.
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Boston University was also the first American university that allowed female students to Medical College, so it can be more inclined than other institutions to be open to minorities in history at that time.
Fuller then became a neuropathologist in the Westborough State Hospital, a Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts, where he carried out autopsies during an internship of two years. His expertise earned him a faculty position in Boston as a full -time instructor in Pathology in 1899, according to the university.
Excuptions greater knowledge, Fuller connected to the Bellevue Hospital in the state of New York, which had a Pathologyab that was the envy of others in the field, Dr. Tia Powell, clinical professor at the Epidemiology department and Population Health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.
A colleague advised Fuller that, to excel further, he had to go to Europe where the level of science and medical education surpassed than that of the US, Powell, author of “Dementia Reimagined: building a life of joy and dignity from start to finish.”
In 1903 the German researcher and pathologist was Dr. Alois Alzheimer – after whom the disease was ultimately named – looking for foreign researchers who could help him with brain research in his Royal Psychiatric Clinic Lab at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. Fuller was one of only five scientists who chose Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s was interested in the normal and pathological anatomy of the brain cerebral cortex. So he and his team, including fuller, advanced techniques for storing and colors of brain tissues and cells to study them under a microscope, said Powell.
Multiple reports credit fuller with the discovery of two brain abnormalities that are characteristic indicators of Alzheimer’s disease: neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques. The first are fibrous tangles made of the protein, while amyloid plaques are the structure of beta -amyloid, a protein that is created during normal brain activity and accumulates as we get older.
But Alzheimer’s was the first to discover and described the tangles in 1906, after his autopsy of Auguste Deter, his former patient, experts said. In just 51 years, detail had memory problems, disorientation and hallucinations. Alzheimer’s also noted that the cortex of Deter was thinner than normal, and that senile plaque was also present. He pioneered the leading theory On the perpetrator behind Alzheimer’s disease, namely that these tangles and plaques block nerve cells to communicate, which ultimately killed them.
What did fuller, however, was challenging this idea, Powell said. Once Fuller returned to the Westborough State Hospital, he discovered that there were people who had died without showing any symptoms of dementia, but had many plaques and tangles in their brains. The opposite was true for other patients.
Fuller argued that the plaques and tangles were therefore “neither necessary nor sufficient for what we would call dementia,” which means that there was not always an easy correlation between those characteristics and dementia, Powell said.
“It’s a pretty striking observation,” Powell added. “He is a great scientist in the sense that he was looking at the data and he spoke very honestly about what he thought it proved and not proved.
“And there are never enough scientists who really do that, who are willing to go against an argument of their supervisors (and that there is a growing consensus),” said Powell. “It requires an incredibly brave and honest person who is really accurate, who is really careful with the conclusions he draws. And that should be someone we see as a hero for every scientist. ‘
The discrepancies Fuller noticed that a restless area in the study of dementia said, experts said. Knowing more about the pathology of a disease helps doctors better understand when and how they can prevent, test and treat, Branson said.
Fuller was an early skeptic about the consensus about the causes of Alzheimer’s disease, but his work has long been overlooked, Powell said. Research for her book “was tempered with real sorrow that I had never heard of him as an academic psychiatrist,” she added. “In all apparently endless years of my training, he never came up once. … and there are many now, many more skeptics. ”
In 1912 Fuller published the first extensive assessment of Alzheimer’s disease, experts said. He also founded a research diary, the Westborough State Hospital Papers.
Fuller resigned from the hospital in 1919 and then worked two senior professors in pathology and neurology at Boston University. He stayed there until 1933, when he retired after the university gave the chairman of the neurology department to a white man who was only out of the training and had just arrived at the faculty as an assistant professor, Branson said.
Fuller was chairman of the department for five years, but the title never received the title, according to the university.
“Fuller was paid less than his colleague professors who were white,” reports an article at the University of Boston. “Fuller was unhappy and said:” With the kind of work I did, I might have continued and reached a higher aircraft if it was not for the color of my skin, “he wrote.”
Fuller then went with the treatment of patients with syphilis in a veteran hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama and trains black psychiatrists to treat Black World War I veterans. He was married to the renowned sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick and they had three children. He became blind of diabetes in 1944 and died of the disease at the age of 80 in 1953.
In recent decades, Fuller’s contributions have been recognized in some respects. In 1969 the American Psychiatric Association created the annual Solomon Carter Fuller Award, who honors a black person “that pioneer has in an area that has significantly improved the quality of life for black people.” The black psychiatrists of America founded the Solomon Carter Fuller program for young black psychiatrists in 1974. And in the same year the Solomon Carter Fuller Mental Health Center was opened in Boston. A high school that was named after Fuller was built in 1994 in Framingham, Massachusetts, where he lived for many years.
“Various perspectives can challenge existing paradigms, promote creative thinking and ultimately lead to breakthroughs that can be overlooked otherwise,” said Branson via e -mail. “This is crucial to ensure that medical research tackles the needs of different populations and leads to fair health care solutions, because it ultimately improves the entire scientific community.”
People can lower their risk of Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia by ensuring that they get a good exercise, nutrition, social connection, involvement in activities and sleep, Branson said. “Those neurofibrillary tangles or plaques are removed from the brain while people sleep.”
Managing stress is also important, as well as tackling vision problems or hearing by wearing a glasses or hearing aids respectively, Powell said.
“None of these things is perfect, but they all seem to contribute to (healthy cognition in old age),” said Powell.
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