The Power of Gratitude
About this episode
The episode discusses a groundbreaking study on Alzheimer's disease conducted by David Snowdon involving Catholic nuns.
A University of Kentucky epidemiologist convinced 678 Catholic nuns to donate their brains and their entire life records to science, and the autopsies he performed quietly rewrote everything modern medicine thought it knew about Alzheimer's disease. The findings have been published in JAMA and the New England Journal of Medicine. Almost nobody outside the field of neurology has heard of them. His name was David Snowdon. He was a young epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in 1986 when he had what most of his colleagues considered a crazy idea. He wanted to study Alzheimer's disease the way it had never been studied before. Not through brain scans of confused 80-year-olds in a hospital. Not through self-reported family histories. He wanted to find a group of people whose entire lives were on paper, from their twenties to their deathbeds, and then look inside their brains after they died and see what the autopsies actually showed. He chose 678 Catholic sisters from the School Sisters of Notre Dame congregation. The choice was not random. Nuns lived almost identical lifestyles. Same diet. Same housing. Same daily schedule. Same medical care. No smoking. No drinking. No…
Topics covered
- Alzheimer's disease
- gratitude
- epidemiology
- research study
- Catholic nuns
- healthcare
Keywords
- Alzheimer's
- gratitude
- David Snowdon
- epidemiology
- research
- Catholic nuns
- health
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Kentucky, School Sisters of Notre Dame, University of Minnesota
Books & works: JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine
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