Every November, Brad Rolph thinks of his grandfather Ed. Rolph, Olathe senior, said Ed Rolph always lived a half-day’s drive away in St. Louis, and the two would seize the Thanksgiving holiday to catch up on football and cards — their two favorite pastimes. Since Rolph enrolled at the University, however, he said a new distance had come between them.

Ed, once a hearts master, now struggles to understand the card game. Last Thanksgiving, he could no longer connect the successful Ohio State Buckeye football team to his alma mater. Ed has Alzheimer’s disease.

“He’s gotten a lot worse,” Rolph said. “He probably won’t remember me the next time I see him.”

When a person is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, damage is often already significant and deterioration of the mind progresses quickly, said David Johnson, assistant psychology professor and Alzheimer’s research specialist. This fall, however, Johnson released findings that show the illness can be detected up to seven years prior to official diagnosis. These “pre-clinical Alzheimer’s” patients, he said, provide new hope for future treatment of the disease.

“We have to detect it earlier and interfere with it earlier because by the time we see frank, functional decline in an individual, there’s so much brain disease that has occurred that it’s unlikely we’re going to find any medical intervention that would reverse that,” Johnson said.

Johnson, who released his findings this fall with three of his former colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, said his findings were part of a study that has lasted longer than 25 years and that he has worked on for a decade. He said he and his colleagues found evidence of “pre-clinical Alzheimer’s” in visual tests. Patients who will be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s within the next couple of years, he found, consistently have difficulty with tasks such as copying complex shapes and processing new codes.

“I hope this paper is a wake-up call,” Johnson said. “There is such a thing as pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease. There are subtle changes that can happen before the more serious changes, and they’re across the board.”

Johnson said he made his discoveries by looking backward through the experiment at the performances of 444 volunteers on tests. There was a subtle but significant difference in performance, he said, between those who would later develop Alzheimer’s and those who wouldn’t.

Johnson said he thought the most important step in continuing Alzheimer’s research would be to identify and treat these patients to try to delay the onset of the full disease. He said currently the only treatment was medication. Most patients have declined too much mentally by the time they are diagnosed to be able to handle cognitive exercises that help prevent the illness. He said he thought these exercises, however, might be useful for treating people with early “pre-clinical Alzheimer’s.”

“We’ll hopefully see something like that in the near future,” Johnson said. “I hope that my research is clinically relevant. That’s what drives me to do what I do — to figure out how to delay the disease.”

Dementia, the category of illness which includes Alzheimer’s disease, can take on various forms, Johnson said. But he said Alzheimer’s, the most common type, accounts for 80 percent of all dementia cases.

“It is the elephant in the room as far as age-related memory disorders,” Johnson said. “It is by far and away the most important to society to be able to diagnose and treat because of its prevalence in the population.”

Kitty Shea, director of the Harbor House Memory Care residence in Lawrence, said her guests struggle with different kinds of dementia but said Alzheimer’s was the most frequent.

Johnson, who has committed his professional career to working at the forefront of research on the disease, said his first experience with the illness came when he was 10 years old.

His grandmother, Florence Johnson, would treat him every Tuesday to a grandmother-grandson dinner in Washington D.C., Johnson said. But in the subsequent six years, he watched his grandma develop Alzheimer’s disease. She became unable to take him through the city and eventually didn’t even remember where she was.

“That was a very different shrewd and sharp woman who lost everything cognitively,” Johnson said of Florence, who died at age 92 when he was 16. “It’s hard to see someone you care about suffer.”

Johnson said he hoped more people, both who have and haven’t lost love ones to the disease, would take up its research. He said part of why he believed research has come so slowly with the disease was that fewer and fewer people were studying the field.

“In the United States the older adult population is booming and America is growing older and we have not done our homework,” Johnson said. “We know very little, relatively speaking, compared to pediatrics or substance abuse.”

Rolph said even though there was no cure to Alzheimer’s and his grandpa, Ed, was still declining, he tried to stay positive and focus on what he still had.

“I still cherish all the moments that I have with him,” Rolph said. “It’s no different. The last couple years that he’s had Alzheimer’s hasn’t affected my perspective of him. I still think he’s a great guy.”

— Edited by Betsy Cutcliff