Utah No. 2 in nation for Alzheimer's

Memories of the year his parents hid a Red Ryder BB gun behind the Christmas tree come easily to John Stone.

In fact, he can even recount the exact number of BB cartons he emptied before his parents woke up that frosty morning in Lewiston, Idaho.

But at 71, John forgets what he had for breakfast today.

His mind can't hold a current thought long enough to retrieve hot dog buns at the grocery store. Or to remember which key does what on the computer. Or that a dear friend he spoke with at church isn't a new acquaintance.

John is one of 30,000 Utahns who have Alzheimer's disease, the second highest incidence in the nation, according to the 2009 Alzheimer's Association Disease Facts and Futures report. That is likely due to the fact that Utahns live longer, and it plays into projections that during the next decade, the Intermountain West will see the nation's greatest increase in Alzheimer's patients, the report said.

For John Stone, Alzheimer's disease has stolen the present while preserving the past. So as his wife, Judy, wrote the annual Christmas letter last month, she decided it wouldn't be real without a paragraph telling extended family and friends about her Parkinson's disease and John's Alzheimer's — a decision he agreed to but likely doesn't remember.

Not the kind of happy news they had been used to sharing over the years. "Coming out of the closet," as Judy put it, was difficult because "the last thing I wanted was for people to feel sorry for us. … It was just time to tell people what's going on in our lives."

In a society where the most lurid details of celebrities' lives are updated daily in the media, there is still something of a social taboo about Alzheimer's. What will people think? How will they react? Or not?

People 65 and older have a 1 in 8 chance of acquiring Alzheimer's, and those who live to 85 have a 47 percent chance of developing the disease. And Utahns who do so "tend to stay here. They don't move to Florida," like they do in so many other states, according to Nick Zullo, program director at the Alzheimer's Association of Utah.

Judy Stone has become part of those statistics, as one of more than 90,000 family caregivers statewide. As she plans the family Christmas party, she knows John will enjoy the celebration. He just won't remember much, if any, of it.

At 63, Judy wasn't yet ready to retire from teaching English at Skyline High School after her own diagnosis a few years ago, though it got to the point "I couldn't read my own handwriting."