By Sandi Doughton Seattle Times staff reporter
AT THE AGE of 92, Betty Roberson’s vision might be blurred, but her mind is sharp.
When she’s not flipping through audio versions of The New Yorker, Foreign Affairs and other magazines, she’s been listening recently to a biography of Teddy Roosevelt. One of her latest musical fascinations is British dance bands of the 1920s and ‘30s.
And since her troublesome right hip was replaced in late January, she’s been able to resume daily walks and is eager to start gardening again.
“I’ve always enjoyed studying and being physically active,” Roberson says, sitting at the dining room table in her half of the duplex she shares with her daughter in Bellevue. “I don’t get bored.”
Roberson’s mother and an aunt developed dementia in their 90s, so she’s alert for slips in her own cognition. So, too, is a team of researchers who have been monitoring her for nearly a quarter of a century.
Roberson is part of one of the world’s longest-running and most comprehensive studies of aging, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Along with thousands of other seniors across King County, she undergoes a battery of tests every two years to gauge her mental acuity, strength and balance, emotional well-being, and overall health.
The project, called Adult Changes in Thought (ACT), was officially launched in 1994. But its roots reach back to 1986, when Dr. Eric Larson and his colleagues at UW Medicine got their first federal grant to work with dementia patients. In those days, little was known about normal aging, let alone what was commonly called senility, Larson recalls. The timing was fortuitous, because funding for Alzheimer’s research was about to explode.
“I would never have dreamed back in the late ‘80s that we’d still be doing this and that it would have grown so much,” Larson says. “ACT has become a living, learning laboratory of aging — especially brain aging.”
OVER NEARLY 30 years, the study has enrolled more than 5,800 people aged 65 or older with the aim of following them through the rest of their lives. None of the participants have dementia when they enter the study. All are randomly selected members of Kaiser Permanente Washington’s health care system — originally Group Health Cooperative — with medical records that stretch back a decade or more. Many, like Roberson, agree to donate their brains to the study after their deaths.