If you had to choose between either your mind or your body deteriorating with age, what would it be?  Sometimes I feel like all of our efforts in medicine to prevent premature death from cardiovascular disease and cancer can work against us – if it isn’t our body that deteriorates, it seems that it will be our mind, if indeed we are around long enough to become ‘old’.

It really hit home to me a couple of months ago that my beautiful, intelligent 90 year-old grandmother was more than mildly demented when my mum rang in a flurry the night before a planned trip to visit me up in Clare from the South East saying “it’s really bad Mel, she didn’t even recognize dad (her husband) and wanted to call the police…she refused to come inside until the police sorted it out…what should we do?”

It all started about three…