Letter to Nightline - 1994

Dear Dr. Schreiber:

I was pleased to have the opportunity to watch you and your colleague, Dr. Marian Diamond, last night, August 5th, 1994, on the Nightline program with Mr. Ted Koppel of ABC on the outcome of your research findings on Alzheimer’s Disease. The whole subject matter of the brain and its functions has always been of fascinating interest to me. I work for the Boston Emergency Services Team as a psychiatric clinician. I like the mental health field and your work certainly tries to define the basis and nature of factors that determine long-term neurological and mental disorders. As such, I listened to your discussion with great enthusiasm.

Back in 1976, when as an undergraduate student at the University of Southern California, I learned about the dendritic spines in my physiological psychology class. It stated that the dendritic spines appear to relate to behavioral experience, and also suggested that, “ the growth and complexity of the development of the brain is enhanced by a rich environment and retarded by a poor environment”, according to Dr. Richard E. Thompson, the author of “Introduction to Physiological Psychology”, the text book used by my class at the time. This finding was evidenced by studies in rats of the same genetic strain but differing environmental settings just as you mentioned in your talk. Dr. Thompson then went on to imply that mental capabilities relate to one’s nature of environment and the quantity of the dendritic spines able to be generated by dendritic spine synapses that are formed after birth in the cerebral cortex.

Your research results place emphasis on the apparent truth of this postulation, but specifically in your case with the additional finding that the amount of dendritic spines that are formed appear to link directly to the eventual development of Alzheimer’s Dementia in old age. Precisely, you stated that the greater the amount of dendritic spines formed in brain the lower the risk of contracting this progressively debilitating illness at old age. It was very pleasing for me to learn that.

However, I would like to share with you my puzzling reservations about your definition of the ‘environmental type’. In other words, what really constitutes a ‘rich’ and a ‘poor’ environments? Are they to be defined by a mere over-supply of material items such as toys or technological gadgets and novelties to mean the richness of the environment of the growing child, given as a classic example by Dr. Thompson, while the lack of such materials to mean a poor environment for the child which, in other words, could impede adequate brain development of the child? Or could it also mean other things rather intangible but positive, like exposure of the child not only to his parents and siblings for love but also to extended families and community for support and attention where there are many other children to play with outdoors to keep the child engaged and belonging? I would think that these could also be seen as richness in the evironment as they can possible be described as promoters to expanding the growth of the dendritic spines. As I recall, you did mention experiences and challenges, such as, long-term educational undertakings, regular exercising and adventurous engagements which could all help in the long run to lower one’s risk factors for possible development of the Alzheimer’s Disease in old age. This is exactly the point that I would gladly like to expand on and to draw my argument as follows:

I was born and raised in Ghana, West Africa until after my secondary school education, when I came to America to attend college. The majority of children in Ghana are born into very poor to average homes, usually encountering some level of malnutrition and undernutrition in their growing years, and definitely could not be furnished with toys and such novelties by their poor parents. They, therefore, encompass the definition ‘poor environment’ as defined by western standards and by Dr. Thompson's suggestions. Many of the children usually also have parents where at least one of them or even both never had any formal education, and are illiterate. Yet very much contrary to expectations, many of these children grow up to become very viable adults gaining achievement often through education and some even becoming leaders in the country. Experience after experience in Ghana traditionally showed that children of poor and struggling families tend to succeed much more in life, and even make great contributions to their society than the children who have been very well provided for when growing up and very likely had many toys to play with when as infants and children. Yet their outcomes in life are usually not any better than their majority counterparts from poor homes. This is because there is the common African belief that the rich children tended to take a lot more for granted and therefore fail to take up the challenges to succeed on their own, thinking instead, that they already had much in store for them by their well-to-do parents. Conversely, poor children are pushed by higher expectations from their parents and the extended family to get good education, be successful and get themselves and their family members out of poverty. Many of those children learn to apply themselves and exhaust every possible way, mainly through education, to succeed for better life and also reach out to their entire families. This fact is evidenced in Ghana and many other African countries where the greater proportion (about 75%) of university student population come from very poor homes. The African child and adult, from my own upbringing experience in Ghana, were burdened by high family commitment and therefore could not afford to fail themselves and their families. These family demands and expectations continue to today.

With all that said, it will be interesting to do a comparative study among a segment of the Ghanaian or an African population to investigate if they would tend to have a lower risk in developing Alzheimer’s disease in their old age. Mental illness in tropical Africa tends to be lower in frequency of episodic crises by many scientific accounts. This seeming beneficial observation has been attributed most likely to the strong family richness and great community living of African societies. This fact of extended family support and influence should be a curious area for investigative research. It can be looked at as a possible environmental asset of enrichment that favors the growing child in Ghana and other African countries yielding high self-esteem and emotional stability, even amid the economically poor backgrounds these people live in. Such re-enforcement of family, community and interpersonal relations, in my analysis, is beneficially invigorating for the child and could help the growth of the dendritic spines, and thus, adding to healthy brain development. Parents in Ghana have generally been made to believe in education and its direct link to a fulfilling adult life. As such, right from the start, parents encourage their young ones to take their studies seriously and help steep their children into the love for higher education. This has suceeded well. Consequently, one of the major problems that the government of Ghana has faced for decades is an over-abundance of university graduates but who cannot be adequately absorbed into the labor force, simply due to a poor national budget, causing high unemployment and underemployment rates. This condition is also very reflective of many other African countries.

If the average Ghanaian is raised to stimulate and to challenge themselves mentally as young children and further as adults, and then into old age, they will be much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other such mentally debilitating illnesses, as in accordance with your dendritic spines theory. Clearly, there could be more factors at any point to defining all illnesses, but certainly African people also deserve to be seen in significant and positive ways to be incorporated into important population research ventures.

In the past, and even to this day, African nations have been portrayed as being engulfed in extreme poverty, civil warfare, and lack of stable governments. The enduring positive heritage of Africa’s lasting traditions and the subsequent advances made in the domain of development after her independence from colonial rules, essentially in the field of education, have been left unnoticed by the West and the rest of the world. America must start to look at other populations in their myriad of research exploits, than just their usual industrialized counterparts for comparative studies. Africa has been totally left out from the competitive world of research, and yet a black population of African origin has since historical time been part of this great nation of America and her surrounding Central and South American countries. For reasons like this and beyond, I have come to believe that African history must be taught in America and on a broader scale to present the best in Africans and all black people for our needed acknowlegment and a shared common humanity.

My humble request to you, therefore, is that if anything can be gained from this brief essay to you, I would anticipate that you and your colleagues may see the vast contribution that Africa can make and kindly take Africans into your consideration for future research investigations. I greatly believe that there is a lot more to Africa than the unfairly hopeless picture that is perpetually portrayed by the western media and writers about the continent and her people. I hope that my analysis here will make sense to you and that you may respond to this with your kind input and advice. Thank you for your television presentation. It was very insightful. May God bless you in your endeavors!

Sincerely,

Hannah Martinez
Master of Science