Maybe You Don't Have Alzheimer's After All

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- She was 65 years old.

"And I was a young 65, believe it or not," says Jeanne Folmer. Retired from real estate and sales, she kept busy playing golf, antiquing and dating.

But things were going downhill. Fast.

Sometimes she couldn't find the words she wanted to say. And she kept falling down.

She didn't sound the alarms to her four grown kids, telling them she was just getting klutzy.

Her kids weren't fooled, though.

Conversations became guessing games. Jeanne might call her daughter and say: "Can you bring over ... um, um, um." And her daughter would throw words out, trying to guess what she wanted.

It wasn't until after more than a year of falling down that Jeanne finally made an appointment to find out what was going on.

The doctors did an MRI. It showed she had enlarged ventricles in her brain. That can mean Alzheimer's. It can also mean that the brain is simply getting old. Or it can mean she had some other condition. One of those other conditions is normal pressure hydrocephalus, commonly called NPH, or water on the brain.

There are three hallmarks of NPH. The first to surface is imbalance. People with NPH are less steady on their feet, fall a lot and sometimes shuffle when they walk. The second symptom is urinary incontinence. And the third is dementia or memory problems.

But the diagnosis isn't easy. Those three symptoms also fit with other conditions, like Alzheimer's. Many primary care doctors simply aren't on the lookout for NPH. Luckily, Jeanne's was.

Doctors drained some spinal fluid over a three-day period to see if her symptoms would improve, the only sure way to know if a patient has NPH.

Jeanne's symptoms improved and the diagnosis was made. A neurosurgeon did surgery on Jeanne, implanting a shunt in her brain to drain the fluid back into her abdominal cavity where it is reabsorbed into the body. The procedure gives NPH patients an 86 percent chance of recovery.

About 7.5 million Americans have some form of dementia, and NPH is believed to account for 5 percent of those cases, which means about 375,000 people have it. But the number of people being treated for NPH is only around 11,000.