As we get older, the fear of marked cognitive decline for many is greater even than the fear of dying. At a recent friends dinner many of us recounted our experiences with a parent who suffered cognitive decline. My wife and I share similar experiences as both of our mothers suffered disabling strokes in their 80s and 90s and both of our fathers had progressive and severe cognitive declines that were very painful to witness. 

How can we better understand what dementia is and can we prevent it or slow its progression? 

Dementia isn’t a specific disease but rather a term used to describe the development of a group of symptoms with impaired ability to think, remember, and problem-solve to make everyday decisions. It is caused by damage to the brain’s nerve cells and their surrounding connections and can have multiple causes.

Alzheimer’s disease

The most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s Disease named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist who in 1906 described the abnormal brain findings in a 50-year-old woman with presenile dementia; that is, dementia occurring at a much earlier age than expected. In 2020 it was estimated that this progressive degenerative condition of unknown cause affected 5.8 million Americans over age 65 and 55 million people globally. It is expected to rise significantly as more people will live longer over the next few decades. 

As Alzheimer’s dementia develops, the brain typically shows progressive clumps of a beta-amyloid protein and fibrous tangles made up of a Tau protein. These tangles interfere with the communication points (synapses) between cells and can lead to cell death and loss of brain volume. 

While the progression of cognitive decline is usually relatively slow, Lewy body dementia, characterized by the deposition of other proteins, is a form that progresses more rapidly and has an overlap with Parkinson’s disease. 

Vascular dementia

The second most common form is vascular dementia, which usually refers to people who have had a loss of brain function due to a stroke. Mixed dementia refers to people with Alzheimer’s who may progress faster if they have abnormal brain blood flow due to atherosclerosis, which is the hardening of the arteries to the brain. 

Other forms of dementia may include brain cell damage due to repetitive brain trauma, nutritional deficiency, immune disorders, or hydrocephalus, which is a build-up of pressure causing tissue shrinkage inside the brain. 

What causes Alzheimer’s?

It is hypothesized that accumulation of the beta-amyloid protein in the brain may arise from various triggers and then leads to the development of tangles of Tau protein that affect communication between brain cells causing loss of function. While genetics plays a role in certain family clusters of early-onset dementia, its role in Alzheimer’s isn’t as clear.

It appears that multiple genetic abnormalities that affect inflammation, protein build-up, and ageing may each contribute. Advances in gene sequencing and the creation of large genetic databases of Alzheimer’s patients are providing insights into calculating the risk of developing the disease as well as helping to formulate targeted strategies to treat it before major irreversible damage occurs.  

How is Alzheimer’s diagnosed?

The diagnosis is typically made by demonstrating decreased performance in cognitive testing that evaluates memory and the ability to perform routine tasks. MRI scans may detect atrophy or shrinkage of the brain which may be non-specific and not just due to cognitive decline. PET scans can determine whether there is decreased metabolic function in different regions of the brain, and a specialized PET scan using targeted tracers can measure the build-up of abnormal amyloid or Tau deposits in the brain. A challenge is that not all people with amyloid protein on scanning have evidence of cognitive decline. While such scans can detect abnormal protein deposition they don’t always predict disease severity. 

Preventing dementia

Modifiable risk factors for dementia patients are easier to define for vascular dementia. Stroke risks can be reduced by eating a healthy diet, regular exercise, avoidance of excessive alcohol intake, control of diabetes and hypertension, lowering cholesterol, and avoidance of smoking. 

There are conflicting studies on the benefits of a healthy Mediterranean-type diet in reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. While such a diet is healthy in many ways in reducing the risks of atherosclerosis, food-based studies are difficult to do given the lack of vigorous control groups and high-quality data on compliance as well as the inability to control for confounding variables. Eating a healthier diet is clearly good for you but at best only has a small role to play in maintaining brain health beyond stroke prevention.  

Blood tests

Newer blood tests may provide insight into the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Measurement of a protein, p-Tau217, in the blood may help identify those at risk of Alzheimer’s and track progression; however, their value is not yet fully defined. This newer blood test measuring Tau protein may soon be marketed as a direct-to-consumer option. It is more accurate than what is offered by the 23 and Me personal genome test which evaluates a different and less specific genetic protein abnormality. There are risks and benefits to having this potential knowledge about the lifetime risk of dementia when treatment options are limited and rates of gene expression and progression are unclear. 

Conventional drug treatment

Conventional drugs targeting the treatment of Alzheimer’s have limited benefits, significant side effects, and work best in the early stages of the disease, despite the many TV commercials anecdotally touting their use. Because there are decreased levels of a brain chemical messenger, acetylcholine, drugs that are cholinesterase inhibitors such as Aricept, Razadyne, and Exelon are commonly prescribed. They work best in early disease and can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and cardiac arrhythmias. Their benefits are limited. 

A second class of drugs such as memantine regulates the activity of glutamate, a brain messenger chemical, and may be useful in moderate Alzheimer’s if the significant side effects can be tolerated. 

Exciting new drugs

Traditional drugs don’t deal with the underlying causes of dementia. Newer approaches look to try and remove amyloid and Tau proteins that have accumulated in the brain on the assumption that they are the cause of the disease. 

The FDA in a controversial decision recently approved the use of Aducanumab (Aduhelm), the first new drug approved in 18 years for people with mild Alzheimer’s. It is a drug that is a human antibody administered intravenously that sticks to the amyloid protein, followed by your body triggering an immune reaction to remove it. The controversy and decision by some insurers to not pay for it relate to cost/benefit and side effects.

The drug is not benign and can cause brain swelling and micro bleeding. It is highly expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars a year, thus limiting potential use. More worrisome is that the improvement in cognition wasn’t nearly as great as the removal of abnormal proteins. More studies are underway to see if earlier use before permanent damage may be more beneficial. Levanamab is a similar drug undergoing extensive testing. 

Dementia remains a highly challenging disorder that has tremendous societal and personal costs to patients, families, and caregivers. While newer tests have improved diagnostic accuracy, they remain somewhat imperfect predictors of preclinical disease and progression. After many frustrating years of little progress in treatment options, a combination of genetics, advanced imaging, and new therapeutic targets finally show some light at the end of the tunnel. New applications are being studied that help to clarify the optimal timing of drug initiation and effectiveness in different ethnic populations. 

In the meantime building a cognitive reserve that softens the decline and keeping healthy and fit to enjoy life as best we can, remains crucial. We need to remember that those affected need our care, love, and emotional support despite the painful challenges. Rather than living in fear of decline, we need to live the life we have to its fullest. 

Thomas Bachelder doesn’t make a lot of wine, he makes a lot of wines. These days that means making small lots of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from organic vineyard sites spread around the Niagara Peninsula from the south shore of Lake Ontario to nearly the top of the Niagara Escarpment for his label, Bachelder Wines. He and his wife and partner in wine, Mary Delaney, buy grapes from established growers, often working off of a top from another winemaker, or patiently waiting for a row or two to become available.

A native Montrealer, Bachelder is among Canada’s most respected winemakers. After deciding he’d rather make wine than write about it, he and Delaney moved from Quebec to Burgundy where he studied and started making wine. After France, he went to Oregon and then Niagara to make wine for the Clos Jordanne project in the mid-2000s. From there he worked in other wineries and made Chardonnay and Pinot Noir under the Bachelder label in what became his three terroirs: Burgundy, Oregon, and Niagara.

The focus today is firmly on Niagara, where he and Mary established the home cellar they call their “Bat Cave”. There, they elevate the wines they began to source from around the Peninsula. This week they braved the traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way to bring a bunch of their wines around the Golden Horseshoe for a trade and media tasting in Toronto featuring the wines from their Toussaint release.

When I got the invitation, I wondered if Toussaints was a new label the Delaney-Bachelders had developed. Only when I downloaded the 42-page catalogue^{1There are very detailed notes for all of the 19 wines in the Toussaint release in the catalogue, which is lovingly written by the wine writer turned maker, and can be downloaded at the Bachelder website: https://bachelderniagara.com/} did I understand it cleverly meant “all saints”, and the wines were officially released on November 1st. We would be tasting 19 wines from nearly as many places, plus a bonus wine: Bachelder’s 2020 Les Villages Bench Pinot Noir, which is a blend.

The tasting was held at Chez Nous, a wine bar on Queen East that serves only Ontario wines, beers, ciders, and spirits. The venue choice was deliberate, and Bachelder explained its owner, Laura Carr, had worked in hospitality all over the world before coming back to Canada with a view to exclusively celebrating what was here—a familiar theme.

Bachelder began the tasting by explaining its purpose. He hoped, he told our group of about a dozen, that we would walk out of the tasting with at least a sense of the difference between the Niagara Peninsula’s two general terroirs: the higher bench lands^{2“A bench or a ‘benchland’ is a long, narrow strip of relatively level land that is bounded by distinctly steeper slopes above and below it. Benches can be formed by many different geological processes, such as a river (as in a river’s flood plain, or an “abandoned” river bed), waves (if alongside an ocean), or the varying levels of erosion of different types of rock. https://bubblyprofessor.com/2013/07/04/geology-escarpment-and-bench/} up the Escarpment^{3“An escarpment is basically an area of the Earth where the elevation changes suddenly. An escarpment is often found along the ocean shore. https://bubblyprofessor.com/2013/07/04/geology-escarpment-and-bench/} itself and the lower lands closer to the shore of Lake Ontario. Of course, because this is wine, for every rule there is at least one exception, so we might also see how an individual site might defy typicity by, for instance, being very close to the water, or placed on a hill that faced a certain direction.

We began by tasting the 2020 Les Villages Niagara Escarpment Bench Pinot Noir. This wine is a blend of many, though not all, of the Pinot sites Bachelder sources from. It’s not technically part of the Toussaint release and was put into bottle earlier than the single-site wines. The idea was to give us a baseline and calibrate our senses into an idea of what the 2020 Niagara Pinot made by Bachelder would taste like. Bachelder’s boutique small-batch wines are not cheap, and he admitted as much by saying he is loath to call Les Villages an “entry-level wine” with a price tag of $35 a bottle. In any event, the wine was vibrant, bright, and fresh with red fruit, calling for food.

And then the whirlwind: eight single-site 2020 Pino Noirs. The first three from “the lake” in the flat lands north of the Queen Elizabeth towards the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Then five from “the bench”, up into the big hill of the Escarpment.

“I try to do the same thing with everything,” explained Bachelder. To poke out the differences between each vineyard, or even parcel within the same vineyard, the winemaker keeps to a relatively low intervention regime. There is about 20 percent new oak ageing in every wine, though this may vary somewhat depending on how many barrels are made.

A loyal disciple of the Burgundian tradition of wood and wine, Bachelder explained that every barrel is its own unique vessel, so despite trying to create control over the winemaking with each lot, two barrels of wine sourced from the same place, treated the same, and sitting next to each other in his Bat Cave may vary considerably. There is always winemaking work to be done, he seemed to say.

With the eight single-site Pinots, Bachelder’s lesson rang true. The lake wines tended to be a little bit fresher and fruitier, and the bench ones maybe a bit more concentrated, or showed some slightly darker cherry notes. Though to be honest, the same words appear in both groups in my notes a lot, so there is a golden thread of red fruit and liveliness that runs through them all.

If the Pinots were a whirlwind, then the 11 Chardonnays that followed, tasted second in the Burgundian tradition, were a hurricane. First, four lakes: crisp and mineral, showing lots of stone fruit. The Patte Rouge, the last of the four, we learned, sadly, was a silent vineyard that no longer held vines after a series of misfortune attended to it in 2021-22, so that what was left was ripped up and it awaits another use.

Then, the seven bench Chardonnays, which showed less stone fruit and more citrus, or sometimes apple…except for the ones that didn’t, or just showed themselves and not much more. Like all things in wine, answers more often than not simply lead to new questions.

Thomas Bachelder and Mary Delaney’s Niagara project is one of these ambitious and innovative endeavours, which in retrospect seems obvious. He is not just making sophisticated and elegant wines that maintain a racy vibrancy. He is mapping the terroir of the region in a precise way that no one has done on this scale. May he find more sites and make many more vintages for the benefit of us all.