Anderson cooper j. T. Launches off the summit. Champion speed rider Valentin Delluc quickly follows, videotaping for us with a camera on his helmet. The ride of a lifetime has begun. Youre standing there on the top of the mountain. What goes through your mind . Theres two mindsets, you know . Theres the. Theres the evel knievel, which is kind of kamikaze. And then, theres the james bond. Cooper which one are you . Im bond. Im steve kroft. Im lesley stahl. Im anderson cooper. Im bill whitaker. Im scott pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 minutes. Befi was a doer. Gia, i was active. Then the chronic, widespread pain drained my energy. My doctor said moving more helps ease fibromyalgia pain. She also prescribed lyrica. Fibromyalgia is thought to be the result of overactive nerves. Lyrica is believed to calm these nerves. For some, lyrica can significantly relieve fibromyalgia pain and improve function, so i feel better. Lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. Tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. Or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. Common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. Dont drink alcohol while taking lyrica. Dont drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. Those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. With less pain, i can be more active. Ask your doctor about lyrica. Do you know how your you might be surprised. Stimulant laxatives make your body go by forcefully stimulating the nerves in your colon. Miralax is different. It works with the water in your body to hydrate and soften, unblocking your system naturally. Miralax. You may be muddling through allergies. Oned with. Try zyrtec® for powerful allergy relief. And zyrtec® is different than claritin®. Because it starts working faster on the first day you take it. Try zyrtec®. Muddle no more®. A big mac . And a grand mac . Man, theres a big mac for every move. We talking about the left right left crossover what . we got a big mac for that and we talking about 30 feet nothing but net. Splash we definitely got a big mac for that to the hoop star. Alleyoop. Watch your head. Ohhhh theres a big mac for that juicy, cheesy, iconic big mac. Now in three sizes. I want to see what you got. All the way up. Get that out of here, boy. Stahl nobelprizewinning colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia marquez once wrote of a mythical town in the middle of the jungle whose residents suffer from a mysterious affliction that erases their memories. Today, in a region of colombia called antioquia, reality appears to be imitating fiction, in a way that may answer questions for all of us. As we first reported last fall, antioquia is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100 certain to develop alzheimers disease. And as devastating as alzheimers is anywhere, this is a particularly cruel version it strikes when people are in their mid40s, and leads to death about a decade later. It is a tragic situation, but a perfect scientific laboratory. And its now the center of a multimillion dollar, n. I. H. Backed study thats trying to find out, for the first time, whether alzheimers disease may be preventable. These are the Andes Mountains and lush countryside of antioquia, colombia, whose capital city, medellin, was once famous for murder and the drug cartel of pablo escobar. Today, medellin or medejin, as its pronounced here is peaceful. But for some families here, theres still a battle going on, a battle against an insidious disease. This family mother cecilia, her seven children, and grandchildren lost its patriarch, alonso. Freddie for me, my father was number one. Stahl freddie, the oldest, remembers his dad always eager to join in and play with him and his friends. Cecilia translated he was a very joyful person. He loved to dance. He was a really nice person, a very good father. Before the disease. Stahl when it first started, what were you noticing that made you think hes hes different . Cecilia translated he started asking, what is the date today . Do i have to go to work . And we got concerned. Stahl alonso at the time was in his mid40s, so the memory loss and confusion made no sense. His doctor suggested exercise and vitamins, but alonso just got worse, forgetting the names of his children, getting lost and disoriented. His son victor had to help him get dressed. Victor translated i gave him his shirt, i told him dad, come, ill help you put your shirt on, and the first thing he did was to grab it and put it on through his feet. Stahl did he understand what was happening to him . Victor translated there were moments of lucidity, where he would ask me and say, son, whats happening to me . Why dont i remember . I dont remember my children, or my wife. I dont know who i am. Stahl his son julio took him back to see the doctor julio translated when i asked the doctor, i told him, doctor, i am not leaving here sorry. Until you tell me what is wrong with my father. Stahl the doctor sent them to francisco lopera, a neurologist at the university of antioquia who knew exactly what was wrong with alonso, because hed become the local authority on a rash of earlyonset alzheimers cases in and around medellin. Francisco lopera they were getting disease very early in the life. Stahl it all began many years earlier, back in the 1980s, when lopera was a young medical resident. He had read about small numbers of people scattered around the world who had developed alzheimers in their 40s. So when a 47yearold man came into his medellin clinic with alzheimerslike symptoms, he was intrigued, and decided to investigate. You met this one man, and you decided to go to where he was from . Lopera i decided to go to the town where he was living. Stahl lopera learned that the mans father and grandfather had also lost their memories in their 40s. Then, a few years later, another similar patient came into the clinic, this time a 42yearold woman from a town 40 miles away. Dr. Loperas thennurse, Lucia Madrigal, asked if any of her relatives also started losing their memories when they were young. Lucia madrigal translated they told us yes, that the father, the uncles, the grandfather, the great grandfather, so i started making a Little Family tree, on one page, and i showed it to dr. Lopera. And i told him, look what we have here. What is this . So many with the same disease. Stahl and so began a detective hunt that lasted more than a decade. Lopera and madrigal traveled all over the region, finding more and more people afflicted with earlyonset alzheimers, and compiling family trees. They thought it might be genetic, so madrigal spent days at parish churches, poring over heavy ledgers where priests for generations had recorded village births, marriages, and deaths. Thanks to these meticulous records, she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years, and to make an important discovery the different families were actually one huge extended family, connected generations back by common ancestors who had died young, with an unusual cause of death written down by the priest softening of the brain. This is what softening of the brain looks like in real life. Fernando is 46 years old, a descendant of that second patient, years ago. He started forgetting things when he was in his late 30s, and now can no longer speak, feed himself, or do just about anything on his own. His aunt takes care of him round the clock, just as she did with his mother, when she got the disease at the same age. Norelly is at an even later stage of the disease. Despite her appearance, she is just 58 years old. Patients were going from mild symptoms to complete dementia and then death within about a decade as dr. Lopera showed us in these cognitive test results. Lopera you can see, at 38 stahl even at 38, this man struggled as many older alzheimers patients do to copy a complex drawing accurately. Lopera at 45. Stahl and things got worse from there. Lopera he lost more. At 50. Stahl ah oh lopera at 51. Stahl oh dr. Lopera was convinced that what he and madrigal were discovering was scientifically important, but even as they found more patients and more related families, he couldnt get anyone outside colombia to take notice. Until 1993, when a harvard professor came to give a talk about alzheimers in bogota, several hours away. Ken kosik there was a person in the audience, francisco lopera, who came up after the talk and said, you know, theres i have a family here that w has earlyonset alzheimers. Stahl ken kosik, now at u. C. Santa barbara, was that professor. A family. Couldve been four people. Kosik it couldve been just four people. But he started to tell me how many it was. And as i listened to him, i became just so absorbed and taken with what he was telling me that i changed all my plans, went with him to medellin. And we began a collaboration that goes on to this day. Stahl they showed kosik what Lucia Madrigal showed us the family tree they had compiled, based on all that searching through church records, for just one of the affected families, going back all the way to the 1800s. This is one family . laughs madrigal una sola stahl it just kept unfolding. And unfolding. Covering these pages are small squares representing men, circles for women. The coloredin squares and circles mean the person got sick with alzheimers at an early age. Look, she had these sons and a daughter. And then it just kept going down through the generations madrigal si. Kosik when we looked at the family trees, about 50 of the offspring were getting the disease. Thats a clear signature of a gene. Stahl but what gene . Kosik connected dr. Lopera with leading geneticists in the u. S. , and they started collecting blood samples and searching. Within a year, a major breakthrough they found a specific mutation in a gene on chromosome 14 one tiny flaw in the d. N. A. Responsible for all this familys suffering. The discovery was published in 1997 in the journal of the american medical association. Lopera had identified the largest concentration of early onset alzheimers cases in the world. If a person has that mutation, do they get alzheimers . Kosik yes, they do. Stahl if they have it, they definitely get the disease. Kosik right. There are some mutations where you dont definitely get it. But this is a bad one. And if you have this mutation, you get it. Stahl for families like alonsos, discovering the mutation was a blessing a crucial first step toward finding a way to fight the disease. But it was also a curse, because it meant that anyone whose parent had the mutation, has a 50 50 chance of having inherited it too. Do any of you know if you have that mutation . Do you know . Victor no. Freddie nobody knows. Stahl nobody knows. Well, somebody knows. Dr. Lopera and his team have been testing for the mutation and compiling a database, but their policy is not to tell family members if they have the mutation or not and not even to reveal the results to dr. Lopera, since at this point, there is nothing that can be done to help. Cecelia translated sometimes i ask, which one will get it . But i throw that thought away, because i dont want to think about that. I pray a lot to god that none of them gets it. I dont want to see my children with that disease. Stahl each one of you knows, because of your father, that you have a 5050 chance. So what kind of a weight does that put on you, day in and day out . Julio translated ive even prayed to god that if if theres one person who has to have the disease, i say to god, let it be me. Sara translated i thank god that im a nurse and that i would be able to take care of them, but i tell myself, first i had to go through it with my dad, the experience of the disease, and i may have to go through it with one of my siblings, or with several, we dont know. Stahl sara told us she would love to have children of her own, but given her risk of developing the disease, shes decided against it. Sara translated so that my children dont have to go through my same experience. Stahl youve been working on this 30 years. How do you cope with all this pain . Lopera crying stahl it was not the response we had expected. Its that hard . Its that hard. But dr. Lopera knew that even in the midst of all this tragedy, there might just be a glimmer of hope. Because what he had discovered in these families hundreds of people destined to develop alzheimers, and easily identifiable with a simple genetic test presented a unique scientific opportunity to test whether its possible to step in and stop earlyonset, and maybe all, alzheimers disease before it starts. That part of the story, when we come back. Good is in every blue diamond almond. And once good gets going, theres no stopping it. Blue diamond almonds. Get your good going. When i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. I just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. My Insurance Company definitely doesnt have that. You can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™ Liberty Mutual insurance only at t offers you all your live channels and dvr on your devices. Datafree. Entertainment. Your way. Only from at t. Announcer actor, scholar, athlete and activist, paul robeson used his acting ability to advance racial equality. Learn more at the. Stahl alzheimers disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the united states. More than five million americans have alzheimers right now, and given the aging baby boomer population, that number is projected to nearly triple by midcentury. Yet unlike many other leading killers, there is no effective treatment. An alzheimers diagnosis is essentially a prescription for a slow descent into oblivion an inexorable loss of the memories, spatial skills, and ability to think that make us who we are. Earlyonset alzheimers patients, like the hundreds of family members in colombia, are a tiny fraction of the whole, but to scientists, they could be everything because they are offering researchers something they have never had before a way to test whether intervening, years before people start having symptoms, might halt the disease in its tracks. Answers are still years away, but with more than 1,000 americans developing alzheimers every day, a way to prevent it cannot come soon enough. The scene we witnessed in dr. Pierre tariots exam room at the Banner Alzheimers Institute in phoenix is one that plays out in neurologists offices every day. Pierre tariot so if i asked you what city were in right now, what would you say . Norm laughs uh, you know, right, i dont know at this moment. Stahl norm, age 72, has been diagnosed with alzheimers the typical, lateinlife form so many of us fear. It begins with mild memory and thinking problems, and spirals into fullon dementia. Tariot who is that young lady over there . Norm betsy. Tariot betsy. And is she a friend . Norm yes. Tariot how do you know betsy . Norm because ive been loving her for a long time. Tariot okay. Is she your sister . Norm a little bit of both. Tariot uhhuh. Is she your wife . Norm i dont think so. I think youre somebody. I wish i was, but stahl theyve been married 51 years. Unlike earlyonset alzheimers, theres been no single gene identified that causes this. Tariot now touch your nose. Stahl no way to know who among us is destined to get it. What percentage of all people are going to get alzheimers . Tariot 1 of us, 60 or older, will have a dementia like alzheimers disease. But by the time you hit 85 stahl what percent . Tariot that, that percentage is approaching 40ish percent. Norm thats a dogan and these are gogans. Tariot alzheimers disease has been called out by the World Health Organization as the coming pandemic of the west. We have to do something to put it behind us. Claudia kawas can you draw the numbers for a clock . Stahl but dr. Claudia kawas, a leading alzheimers researcher and clinician at the university of californiairvine, says shes frustrated that she cant offer her patients any hope. Kawas i have to say, ive been doing this now for a third of a century. And when i started, i just never would have believed we would still not be closer than we are now to making a real difference. It has been a little disappointing. Stahl it hasnt been for lack of trying. Kawas gave us a quick primer on the telltale signs of alzheimers in the brain after autopsy. Kawas every place you see a brown spot, that is a senile amyloid plaque. In contrast, you see these black things that tend to be triangular shape. Those are what we call neurofibrillary tangles. Stahl the relationship between plaques and tangles isnt completely understood. But because its been shown that amyloid plaques build up in the brain before tangles, and years before patients develop symptoms, pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s developing drugs to remove amyloid from the brain, and hundreds of millions more to test those drugs in patients like norm. Of all the trials that have been done, what percent have succeeded . Tariot about 1 . Stahl in other words, a resounding failure. So what does that say, do you think . Kawas well, it says either amyloid is not the right thing to go after, or it says we need to remove it earlier on in the process, before its made all the other things cascade after it. You know, if you give a polio vaccine once somebody has polio, you can understand why it doesnt work. Stahl youre saying that maybe those drugs havent worked because the person already had alzheimers . Kawas exactly. And maybe if we give them early enough, it might work. Stahl but how can you test drugs on people before they develop the disease, when you dont know who among us is going to get it . Dr. Tariot and the executive director at the Banner Alzheimers Institute, dr. Eric reiman, realized there was a place where you could know who was going to get alzheimers antioquia. Kosik and thats when my phone began to ring. Stahl by then, ken kosik had been studying the colombian extended family for 15 years. Kosik received a call from the people at banner. And they said, you know, you have this family. We know when theyre going to get it. We know whos going to get it. Can we start treating before the disease strikes . Stahl kosik connected tariot and reiman with dr. Lopera, who by that time had identified hundreds of people who carried the gene mutation, guaranteeing that they would be struck with alzheimers in the prime of their lives. Reiman and tariot traveled to medellin and met with both healthy and sick members of the extended family. Is this particular family, in the world extraordinary . Tariot theres nothing else like it. The idea that theres this concentration within roughly 100 miles of each other is just an extraordinary phenomenon. Stahl and a perfect scientific laboratory. To lay the groundwork for a large clinical trial, banner flew a group of extended family members from medellin to phoenix for pet scans. One goal to compare the brains of those with