While the shadow of Alzheimer’s looms over the book, representing an intractable condition that Peskin routinely confronts in her clinical practice, “A Molecule Away from Madness” is a fascinating tour of different kinds of ways that the brain can lead to the breakdown of mental life. In fact, it has already been key to solving several mysteries of why seemingly healthy people appear to suddenly fall into a mental inferno.īOOK REVIEW - “A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain,” by Sara Manning Peskin (WW Norton & Company, 224 pages). Molecular research has transformed our understanding and treatment of cancer in recent years, and now it is beginning to do the same for brain diseases. It is demoralizing and infuriating to think about how, nearly 15 years later, no breakthrough cure or proven prevention strategy has panned out.īut neurologist Sara Manning Peskin argues in “A Molecule Away from Madness: Tales of the Hijacked Brain” that we could be on the brink of a revolution in confronting diseases like this because scientists have a better handle on how molecules work in the brain.
As a budding health reporter, I tried to learn everything I could about Alzheimer’s and wrote about new research on preventions and treatments that everyone wanted to believe had potential. M y grandmother was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease when she died in 2007, not long after I graduated from journalism school.
0 kommentar(er)
