An Essential Guide to the Disease and Other Forms of Dementia

Alzheimer's

A short, easily understandable account of Alzheimer's, by world expert Dr Andrew Lees 
 
Britain like the rest of the developed world is in the grip of a silent plague. Its thousands of victims can no longer make sense of the world and are contained for their own safety in fading Victorian piles and nondescript redbrick detention centres around the country. For them the present is a foreign country and the past a lost continent. 
 
There are now more people in the UK with Alzheimer's than the population of Liverpool, and four million Americans are reported to have the disease. Longevity is a major factor in the increasing incidence of the disease, with the number of over 65s in the UK having trebled in the last 100 years, and forecast to double again in the next 25 years. With such an alarming background, the race to find the causes - and therefore potentially a cure - for Alzheimer's is urgent. 
 
In this Penguin Special, Dr Andrew Lees, a world expert on the neurodegenerative diseases explains what we know, and don't know, about Alzheimer's and its amelioration. 
 
Dr Andrew Lees is Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London, and Clinical Director of the Queen Square Brain Bank for Neurological Disorders. His major scientific research has been carried out in the field of dementias and Parkinson's disease. A native of St Helens, Lancashire, he lives in north London.

Dr Andrew Lees is Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London, and Clinical Director of the Queen Square Brain Bank for Neurological Disorders. His major scientific research has been carried out in the field of dementias and Parkinson's disease. 
His book Ray of Hope (Penguin, 1998), about the Liverpool and England footballer Ray Kennedy who suffers from Parkinson's, was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award. As well as several scientific works, he has written a social history of Liverpool, The Hurricane Port (Random House, 2011). 
A native of St Helens, Lancashire, he lives in north London.

Britain like the rest of the developed world is in the grip of a silent plague. Its thousands of victims can no longer make sense of the world and are contained for their own safety in fading Victorian piles and nondescript redbrick detention centres around the country. For them the present is a foreign country and the past a lost continent. 
There are now more people in the UK with Alzheimer's than the population of Liverpool, and four million Americans are reported to have the disease. Longevity is a major factor in the increasing incidence of the disease, with the number of over 65s in the UK having trebled in the last 100 years, and forecast to double again in the next 25 years. 
With such an alarming background, the race to find the causes - and therefore potentially a cure - for Alzheimer's is urgent. In this Penguin Special, Dr Andrew Lees, a world expert on the neurodegenerative diseases, explains what we know, and don't know, about Alzheimer's and its amelioration. The drugs that are currently available do not do enough to help, and the various physical and mental exercises we are encouraged to undertake are unproven. Yet it's not entirely a black picture: scientific endeavour has greatly increased our knowledge of the disease's spread and rate of deterioration, and the composition of the starchy plaques and the mechanism of the bindweed tangles in the brain which are core to the illness are much better understood. 
Alzheimer's is tough even to contemplate. But it represents one of the greatest medical mysteries of our age, and Andrew Lees's book provides a fascinating account of our knowledge of this terrible disease to this point.

Dr Andrew Lees

Powerful, passionate, punchy and provocative

At last a book on Liverpool with the heart and zest the city deserves . . . a cornucopia of colour and detail

The remarkable sweep and scope of this book traces the many origins and formative energies of this most anarchic, carnivalesque, promiscuous and contradictory of cities

Paul Farley, poet and author of Edgelands

The author has threaded his way through [a] tangled web of materials vividly to evoke for us a distinctive myth-history of the city

Peter Robinson, poet and editor of The Liverpool Accents

A melancholic  peregrination through Liverpool and its history . . . the book distills a history of  the slave trade, migration and the development of the port, establishing  Liverpool's peculiar character via familiar themes: football, sectarianism,  music, dialect, violence, dockers and the Militant  tendency

Scousers believe they live in a special place, one that has more in common with Salvador da Bahia, New Orleans or Gdansk than anywhere in England, and the city has always punched above its weight. In less than a hundred years, however, Liverpool's image has declined from a major mercantile player known as the Second City of the Empire to what some social commentators have described as a cultural backwater remembered largely as the place where the Beatles were born. 
 
In Liverpool: The Hurricane Port, Andrew Lees reveals how Liverpool's pre-eminence in the slave trade left an indelible scar on the psychogeography of the city. He also explores the roots of Liverpool's contrary nature, its rebelliousness and its hedonism, as well as some of the recent hurricanes that have battered the city, including the anger of Toxteth, the Hillsborough disaster and the murder of James Bulger. In this distinctly personal account, Lees defines the characteristics of this Celtic enclave, with her loudmouthed, big-hearted people who have created a city quite different from anywhere else in the world.

Dr Andrew Lees

Praise for Liverpool: The Hurricane Port

Powerful, passionate, punchy and provocative

At last a book on Liverpool with the heart and zest the city deserves . . . a cornucopia of colour and detail

The remarkable sweep and scope of this book traces the many origins and formative energies of this most anarchic, carnivalesque, promiscuous and contradictory of cities

Powerful, passionate, punchy and provocative

At last a book on Liverpool with the heart and zest the city deserves . . . a cornucopia of colour and detail

The remarkable sweep and scope of this book traces the many origins and formative energies of this most anarchic, carnivalesque, promiscuous and contradictory of cities

Powerful, passionate, punchy and provocative

At last a book on Liverpool with the heart and zest the city deserves . . . a cornucopia of colour and detail

The remarkable sweep and scope of this book traces the many origins and formative energies of this most anarchic, carnivalesque, promiscuous and contradictory of cities

Books by Dr Andrew Lees

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