Robert Katzman; changed how Alzheimer's tracked, treated

LOS ANGELES - Dr. Robert Katzman, a neuroscientist who pushed Alzheimer's disease into the public consciousness as a "major killer" and who cofounded the Alzheimer's Association, died Sept. 16 at his home in La Jolla, a San Diego community, after a long illness. He was 82.

"His pioneering and, really, revolutionary work in Alzheimer's disease for more than three decades paved the way for clinical trials of potential treatments to delay the onset or progression of the disease being done today," said neuroscientist David P. Salmon of the University of California-San Diego, where Dr. Katzman worked since 1984.

Alzheimer's was first described in 1906 by the Bavarian psychiatrist Dr. Alois Alzheimer. But it was considered to be a rare form of senile dementia that occurred primarily in patients younger than 65.

Dr. Katzman studied many dementia patients, especially the elderly, and concluded that they had Alzheimer's. In a seminal 1976 editorial in the journal Archives of Neurology, Dr. Katzman concluded that senile dementia was not a normal part of the aging process, as had been believed, but that it was a disease - in fact, Alzheimer's disease.

Extrapolating from estimates of the prevalence of dementia, he concluded that Alzheimer's was the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, trailing only heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

Dr. Katzman's efforts increased the number of Alzheimer's cases many-fold and challenged the long-held idea that growing old was the primary cause of dementia, sociologist Patrick Fox of the University of California, San Francisco wrote in the Milbank Quarterly.

These ideas provided the ammunition "to define the disease as a major social and health problem and to mobilize the resources to address the defined problem," he wrote.

Funding for Alzheimer's research grew from $5 million in 1980 to $647 million in 2005.

In 1977, Dr. Katzman and his close colleague, Dr. Robert D. Terry of the University of California at San Diego, organized the first national conference on Alzheimer's disease, triggering a boom in research.

In 1981, he and his colleagues formed the Alzheimer's Disease and Related Disorders Association - later renamed the Alzheimer's Association - which has become a major source of private funding for research and an advocate for patients.

Robert Katzman was born in Denver, the son of a physician. He served in the Navy during World War II as an electronic technician's mate, and then enrolled in the University of Chicago. There, he became interested in the chemistry of the brain, but because there were no classes on the topic, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School, receiving his degree in 1953.

After a residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, he joined the faculty of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he spent 30 years before finishing his career in San Diego.