The neurologist’s diagnosis sent Sara Belt’s family members into shock.
Alzheimer’s disease? At just 53 years old?
“I went numb, ” her husband, Don Belt, said of that summer day three years ago.
The 74-year-old venture capitalist and former corporate marketing executive recalls feeling helpless and dazed as he squeezed the hand of his wife, a Carnegie Mellon alumna who’d always challenged him intellectually and who taught math and Spanish to young children for nearly three decades.
Her children, in their early 20s, were devastated to learn that she had early onset of a progressive neurodegenerative disorder with no known cure. The grim prognosis: losing cognition in as soon as three to five years.