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Aging with Grace: The Nun Study and the science of old age, Fourth Estate,
£16.99, ISBN 1841152919

GIVE me your brain, please. Look, sister, you won’t need a brain when you’re
dead, so I’ll have it—OK? How do you go about asking someone if you can
have their brain? It’s hard when you’re a shy young epidemiologist struggling to
make a name for yourself in Alzheimer’s research. David Snowdon’s request in
1990 was made harder by the fact that his potential subjects were elderly
Catholic nuns, steeped in the doctrine of bodily resurrection.

But, the School Sisters of Notre Dame, who have convents all over North
America, have come to view their role in the Nun Study as part of their sacred
duty to ease the suffering of others. To date, 678 have signed up, providing
extraordinary insights into this devastating disease.

Snowdon not only describes the key findings, but also gives touching accounts
of the lives and work of the nuns. In Aging with Grace, we glimpse a closed,
peculiarly uniform world ideal for teasing apart epidemiological variables.
Among the startling conclusions is the revelation that our chances of developing
Alzheimer’s in old age can be predicted from linguistic abilities in our early
twenties.

And yet, the study also found that the brain has an amazing capacity for
adaptation, at times defying the encroachment of plaques and neural tangles that
characterise Alzheimer’s. The nuns still have a lot to teach us about the
lifestyle and attitudes needed to age successfully—with grace.