As an occupational therapist, when Deborah Barham sometimes moves an Alzheimer's patient's arm or massages a certain spot, memories will flow.
She said her patients begin to talk about repressed emotional experiences. More startlingly, if she goes back later and moves the same limb or rubs the same spot, the exact recollections pour from the man or woman in her care.
The body and brain, she believes, can hold fast to emotions. Barham also believes chronic stress, the product of traumatic emotional experiences, could be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer's disease.
To be specific, Barham theorizes that chronic, unresolved stress leads to anxiety, depression and insomnia and can lead to other forms of mental illness, Alzheimer's included.
"In 1906, Dr. (Alois) Alzheimer said this is a mental illness we know little about," Barham said. "We've forgotten it's a mental illness. To me, it's chronic stress, plus time and, ultimately, (brain) deterioration."
The 51-year-old Hickory resident spent 16 years researching and working on a piece of writing she has released on DVD, "Over a Century of Alzheimer's Disease: Changing Focus from Memory Loss to The Stress of Life."
Barham, a licensed occupational therapist for 28 years and a licensed acupuncturist, became interested in Alzheimer's while she worked for long-term care providers.
"I had a lot of questions," she said. "I'd go home and put the questions in my bedside table, hoping one day they would be answered."
Chief among the questions she scribbled were what causes the disease and whether it can be prevented.
She had to look for answers on her own. When her father, longtime Morganton physician Luther Hall Clontz, died, she decided she had to finish her writing about the subject. She hopes the DVD will help shed light on the subject and encourage more study.
Barham spent time observing Alzheimer's patients, her grandmother, an aunt and an uncle included. She spent her free time with other patients.
She read books and scientific journals about the disease, learning that only 5 percent of the cases are inherited, she said.
"That means for 95 percent of people, we don't know what causes it," she said.
Barham also undertook a study in which she looked at more than 50 people with Alzheimer's. She said all of them had doctor-diagnosed mental illnesses or emotional problems in addition to Alzheimer's
For Barham, that reinforced the theory that stress, which can lead to mental illness, can also lead to Alzheimer's.
Specifically, she explains in her DVD, a part of the brain releases hormones that excite the body, or spur it to react, in response to stress. Another part of the brain releases inhibitory hormones, those that encourage the body to "let it go."
When we instead hold onto that stress, Barham believes the inhibitory hormones can begin to break down brain cells.
She also believes there are ways to thwart the disease. At the top of her list: Learn new and novel things. Introduce your brain to something it knows nothing about, she says.
"Get nerve cells communicating in way they haven't before."
Barham took her own advice when she was 40 and learned to ride a motorcycle.
She also recommends "feeling our feelings." In other words, Barham says to let emotions come out instead of bottling them up.
"I say our emotions are like the rain is to the environment," she says. "It's necessary and it's cleansing. When we don't feel our feeling, the (brain) gets clogged up."
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