Jason Karlawish’s review of Margaret Lock’s book, The Alzheimer Conundrum, was recently published in Health Affairs, a journal of health policy thought and research. Dr. Karlawish, Associate Director of the Penn Memory Center, writes that The Alzheimer Conundrum is “an ambitious dissection of a vexing problem: Despite several decades of research, dementia remains a very real and devastating problem, and the causes of the most common form—Alzheimer’s disease—remain elusive.”
“In 2002 Margaret Lock, a medical anthropologist at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, started work on a book about the social implications of genetic testing for complex diseases. She chose Alzheimer’s disease as her case study,” Dr. Karlaiwsh writes. “Lock soon discovered that she had stepped into a far more complex and controversial situation than she had anticipated. ‘Among experts,’ she observed, ‘the very category of AD [Alzheimer’s disease] was being subjected to questioning and possibly category fragmentation or reshuffling was in the air, making for a plethora of unknowns.’ Lock set out to explore these unknowns.”
You can read the full book review at Health Affairs.org