Cowen on ... Alzheimer's Society. (Opinion).

About 500,000 people in the UK suffer from Alzheimer's disease, so it's hardly surprising that so many of us know someone affected by the condition.

My great uncle developed Alzheimer's in his early sixties -- when I was still very young. I remember visits to him and my great aunt quickly dwindling as he suddenly became unable to register just who my younger brother and I were. His speech would roll on in never-ending, constantly repetitive sentences. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said and so continued making the same point in a desperately determined effort to make himself understood.

My brother and I didn't see Uncle Peter in hospital before he died. We barely spoke about him for years afterwards. My family felt visits would have been needlessly distressing for both him and us. It was already causing immense grief for my great aunt. Only shortly before she died last year did she seem to come to terms with the immense pain, frustration and guilt his condition had caused her.

When I first heard about Atlas' new work for the Alzheimer's Society, I wasn't sure that the idea used -- a series of increasingly abstract and confused paintings by the Alzheimer's sufferer William Utermohlen -- could communicate the hopeless isolation into which the disease plunges sufferers and their loved ones. I had similar concerns about Richard Eyre's Iris Murdoch biopic with which the 50-second cinema ad is starting its run. I haven't seen the film yet but I was certainly wrong about the ad. In its simple way, I think it's fantastic.

For a disease that affects so many, our actual knowledge of Alzheimer's is extremely vague. There was a snippet in the paper last week about how drinking beer may prevent it. We know aluminium saucepans could be a guilty party. However, many of us still see Alzheimer's, subconsciously, as a natural part of the ageing process.

Where great artists are concerned, there's even a tendency to see ...