If you have Alzheimer’s, and you want to use cryonics, you should do your very best to get frozen well before you die of the disease.
This is problematic in all jurisdictions I can think of. Even where euthanasia is legal, I don’t know of any cryonics organisations taking advantage, and there might be problems for them if they do. I’d very much like to be proven wrong in this.
It is sometimes possible to die by refusing to eat/drink. Ben Best has some conflicting claims about how feasible that is with Alzhiemer’s here and here.
I believe it’s probably only because of the woefully under-developed state of cryonics itself that the practice of voluntary death through cryopreservation (cryothanasia) haven’t been seriously researched: rather counter-intuitively, cryonics companies are too few and mostly have enough trouble on their hands to bother disrupting the status quo.
Getting frozen before you die can well be problematic, but not necessarily impossible in all jurisdictions. I believe it’s just not well researched. Cryonics has low demand as it is, and cryothanasia requires even greater mental effort to voluntarily choose death, before dying the ‘natural’ way, and make all the necessary research and preparations yourself, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that noone bothered yet, or noone who made their efforts public, at the very least. Which doesn’t mean that this is impossible. Suicide tourism is a thing, after all.
I would recommend directly contacting Danila Medvedev (medvedev@tranhuman.ru) from Russian company CryoRus, if you are really practically interested in the prospect of cryothanasia—it is likely that it is possible, but noone is going to offer it as a product, so far, you will have to research it for yourself; they are at least entertaining the idea.
Decidedly mixed. In the very late stages of Alzheimer’s large sections of brain tissue are literally gone. See e.g. here. On the other hand, even with fairly late stage patients they do have better and worse days where they remember more or less, which suggests that some memories are still present. We also know that in some animal models treatment can apparently restore some amount of memory. See for example here (which may be behind a paywall). That last link is to some very new, very recent research suggesting a form of high powered ultrasound may actually help Alzheimer’s in mouse models, and there’s decent reason to believe that this will work in humans.
What evidence do we have about whether cryonics will work for those who die of Alzheimer’s?
If you have Alzheimer’s, and you want to use cryonics, you should do your very best to get frozen well before you die of the disease.
This is problematic in all jurisdictions I can think of. Even where euthanasia is legal, I don’t know of any cryonics organisations taking advantage, and there might be problems for them if they do. I’d very much like to be proven wrong in this.
It is sometimes possible to die by refusing to eat/drink. Ben Best has some conflicting claims about how feasible that is with Alzhiemer’s here and here.
I believe it’s probably only because of the woefully under-developed state of cryonics itself that the practice of voluntary death through cryopreservation (cryothanasia) haven’t been seriously researched: rather counter-intuitively, cryonics companies are too few and mostly have enough trouble on their hands to bother disrupting the status quo.
Getting frozen before you die can well be problematic, but not necessarily impossible in all jurisdictions. I believe it’s just not well researched. Cryonics has low demand as it is, and cryothanasia requires even greater mental effort to voluntarily choose death, before dying the ‘natural’ way, and make all the necessary research and preparations yourself, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that noone bothered yet, or noone who made their efforts public, at the very least. Which doesn’t mean that this is impossible. Suicide tourism is a thing, after all.
I would recommend directly contacting Danila Medvedev (medvedev@tranhuman.ru) from Russian company CryoRus, if you are really practically interested in the prospect of cryothanasia—it is likely that it is possible, but noone is going to offer it as a product, so far, you will have to research it for yourself; they are at least entertaining the idea.
Decidedly mixed. In the very late stages of Alzheimer’s large sections of brain tissue are literally gone. See e.g. here. On the other hand, even with fairly late stage patients they do have better and worse days where they remember more or less, which suggests that some memories are still present. We also know that in some animal models treatment can apparently restore some amount of memory. See for example here (which may be behind a paywall). That last link is to some very new, very recent research suggesting a form of high powered ultrasound may actually help Alzheimer’s in mouse models, and there’s decent reason to believe that this will work in humans.