Alzheimer’s patients benefit from keeping mentally active
CITYWIDE During the final years of his life, Dan Michel was a man who was unfamiliar with his family and vice versa.
“There was a guy who looked like my father, but he wasn’t my dad,” said his son, Dan Michel Jr. “My dad had long disappeared.”
The man who invented the valves on whipped cream cans had become a changed man in the final years of his life before passing away at the age of 92 in 2004, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Named after German physician Alois Alzheimer who diagnosed the first patient with the degenerative brain disease, Alzheimer’s affects more than five million Americans according to the Alzheimer’s Association. It’s considered to be the most common form of dementia and is a disease for which there is no known cure.
The disease involves the failure of brain cells but scientists have not yet discovered why they stop functioning, according to the association.
The younger Michel painfully saw his father fall deep-er into dementia and decided to take action, creating a
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 23, 2007. Read the original PDF.