There are four activities that can typically reach persons at all stages of Alzheimer's disease. Being visited by a child is one of them, as young Max discovered. Others include having a visit from a pet, listening to or playing music and observing or creating artwork.

It might very well be the case that adequate adiponectin activity may help reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer's. However, resistance to the hormone may prevent the body from benefitting from the those effects. Further research is needed to resolve this new puzzle.

My wife's 103-year-old grandmother lived in a third floor walk-up apartment in New York City. The exercise she got on those stairs and errands may not only have protected her heart so she could live past 100, it may also have protected her brain.

Today, too many families face President Reagan's "long goodbye" -- and too many Alzheimers' victims know, even as the disease begins to rob them of their memories, of the pain their families will face.