Offered up as my gift to the New Year: "Twilight Dreams." My 11th art quilt donated to the Alzheimer's Art Quilts Initiative during 2010 and currently available on the AAQI site.
As part of our on-going Liberated Quilting Challenge, it is meant to usher in my own dreams for a new and better year. A year where more wonderful advances will be made in our fight against Alzheimer's Disease. A year when those of us with family members with Alzheimer's and related dementia's won't have a 60% chance of getting the disease in my own lifetime with over 15 members of my family..having, or having had this terrible disease.
Out of my immediate family, which includes aunts and uncles, 14 dearly loved, valued, and treasured people have already died of this life changing illness. Please bid generously on any of the quilts you see at AAQI but do consider giving special attention to those of our Liberated Quilting Challenge ;)
And as my personal challenge to each of you: if I can make and donate 11 art quilts last year...6 months with a broken wrist and almost 4 months living in Alaska without access to any of my supplies...then I challenge you to make at least half of what I did in 2010!
Our AAQI Quilters Have Financed a New Alzheimer’s Discovery! I have just learned from Ami Simms that the research financed by AAQI and carried out by Dr. Mi Hee Lim and her colleagues at the University of Michigan has yielded wonderfully positive results!
Their research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Thousands of web pages all over the world are now carrying this story and a mention of our funding is showing up in them, over and over!
In March of this year, the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative awarded a $30,000 grant to the University of Michigan for research under the direction of assistant professor Dr. Mi Hee Lim for research she has been doing with lab members Jung-Suk Choi and Joseph Braymer regarding molecular tools that both grab metal ions and interact with amyloid-beta tangles in Alzheimer's victims brains.
Ami and her support team not only brought the check for our earned research monies but she also brought quilts to show the researchers, as well. Just picture that amazing scene.....Ami and her support staff showing our quilts as they described how we make them, donate them, and auction them off to raise the money for the check that Ami then handed over to them! What a wonderful and amazing thing!
Because of our funding, Dr Lim and her team were able to create new molecular tools that show promise for cleansing the brain of amyloid plaques. These plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, are clumps of misfolded proteins thought to cause cell death leading to devastating memory loss and cognitive decline. Finding ways to cross through the blood brain barrier is something I have been reading about for years and here this team has worked out a means and a method that might significantly alter Alzheimer's research from now on!
The researchers went on to show that in solutions with or without living cells, the molecules were able to regulate copper-induced amyloid-beta aggregation, not only disrupting the formation of clumps, but also breaking up clumps that already had formed.
This is just one amazing step towards a possible cure, but it's a promising one!
As someone who has a very great chance of getting Alzheimer's myself...with 15 immediate family members having had, or my mother now currently having.....this horrible disease....everything that AAQI does, every word that Ami Simms writes or says in a press release means the world to me and I have shared that with her repeatedly. She and all of the researchers and all who care and take that caring and do something positive with it...they are my heroes.
If any one of you, who loved your own mother, your own father, your aunts or yours uncles, your husbands, or sisters or brothers, had to watch what happens to them...first their memory, then their body...limb by limb, organ by organ, until they no longer have control over anything anymore...trust me, you would be as passionate as I am.
And if you've ever made a quilt, bought a quilt or donated money...or if you are even a tiny bit as excited about this as I am....please give a link back and blog it, email it, facebook it.
For those who like scientific info: Google “Unraveling Alzheimer’s: Simple small molecules could untangle complex disease” to get the details.
Never underestimate the power of quilts, quilters, and quilting! We are making a difference!
One of the 11 art quilts that I made and donated to AAQI in 2010 and 1 of 53 small quilts that will be traveling the country as part of the AAQI 2011 Traveling Exhibit of larger 'name' quilts. Alzheimer's Illustrated: From Heartbreak to Hope
Liberated Quilting Blog shares news of AAQI-funded research! Liberated Quilting Challenge: Unraveling Alzheimer's: Simple small molecules could untangle ... www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid...id... - Cached Twitter / Alzheimer's Art Quil: Liberated Quilting Blog sh ...
Liberated Quilting Blog shares news of AAQI-funded research! http://fb.me/FNzoBHSF. twitter.com/AAQIUpdate/status/14367857865400321 - Cached
