It is the defining modern tragedy

(Alzheimer's sufferer shuffling stage)

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The ageing population, its illnesses, and what the hell we're going to do about them: recurrent questions in the run-up to the general election, and something the creative world is having to face up to, too. With the number of Alzheimer's sufferers in Britain projected to pass the one million mark by 2025 and still no cure, dementia in particular is a subject just as ripe for the creative imagination as immigration or the war in Iraq. But for some reason, while Iris brought it to the big screen in 2002, and The Archers' Jack Woolley has been succumbing to the illness on our airwaves for some time now, theatre has by and large chosen to forget the disease of forgetting.
The Lion's Face, a new opera from the Opera Group, is currently trying to drag it into view. Scored by Elena Langer, with lyrics by Glyn Maxwell, this is a remarkably matter-of-fact engagement with the subject, built out of five years' worth of research among scientists, clinicians, sufferers and their carers, and staged with bleak realism in a care home of ugly white furniture and sterile screens. It is also unblinkingly direct: Mr D isn't a lead character who "just happens to have" this disease. His Alzheimer's is the engine of the whole piece, there in the scrambled semi-poetry of Maxwell's libretto as well as the fact that Mr D only speaks, while his visitors sing (a stylistic conceit that echoes Black Daisies for the Bride, Tony Harrison's 1993 BBC2 film-poem about the disease, which featured an elderly opera singer reduced to warbling a few notes from Madame Butterfly). Read more: guardian.co.uk

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Reducing the risk of developing chronic inflammation

Increased intakes of fruit and vegetables may decrease markers of inflammation linked to a range of chronic diseases, says a new study from Spain.  Read more: nutraingredients.com

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