[sportscurmudgeon]

A former colleague of mine - a well regarded physicist who worked for NASA for a while and then became a professor at a major US university - has what is diagnosed as early onset Alzheimers and it is the rapidly developing variety of that disease. The current thinking is that it was brought on by a severe head injury he incurred skiing about 5 years ago.

Because no one actually knows how Alsheimers gets started, this is still conjecture, but there is a segment of the medical community - not the fringies out there screching about theoritical nonsense - that believes that blows to the brain can sometimes trigger the onset of Alzheimers. There are brain studies ongoing to try to demonstrate the mechanisms by which this might happen.

My former colleague has been given another 12-18 months to live. He just had his 52nd birthday last month...