Harry Fuget has spent about 10 years watching his wife's decline from Alzheimer's disease, but Gladys is still healthy enough that he figures another decade could lie ahead.

	Martha Rial/Post-Gazette
	Gladys and Harry Fuget in their North Point Breeze home.

He has no illusions that the couple's remaining years will be any easier than the ones just passed, of Gladys' memory loss, occasional outbursts and false accusations. Still, the calm former bank manager can't imagine being anywhere other than with his wife of 45 years in their North Point Breeze home.

"The future is not some place I'm madly dashing to get to, but it's going to get me whether or not I'm ready for it," said Fuget, 78, in a comment to be televised nationally.

The Fugets are among families whose struggles with dementia are documented in "The Forgetting: A Portrait of Alzheimer's," a 90-minute program airing on WQED and the rest of PBS at 9 p.m. tomorrow. It is followed by a 30-minute question-and-answer session featuring four experts on the disease, including Dr. Steven DeKosky, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Alzheimer Disease Research Center.

Research at the Pitt center is highlighted in the program, which was based on a book about Alzheimer's written by author David Shenk of Brooklyn. Elizabeth Arledge, who produced and directed "The Forgetting" for Twin Cities Public Television, spent time in Pittsburgh in late 2002 and early 2003 observing the Pitt center's work, DeKosky and his associates, and filming the families they assist.

In addition to the Fugets, the camera crew spent time with Reda Scully of Lawrenceville and her son, Jerry Jones of Bloomfield. Their anguished reactions are shown when DeKosky first diagnoses Scully, a long-independent woman now 85, as having developed early, mild Alzheimer's.

Martha Rial/Post Gazette
Long before Alzheimer's, a beaming Gladys Fuget, then 33, was captured in this family photograph.

"We don't have a cure for this," DeKosky tells them. "We have medicines we think you should start, which we hope will slow the clinical progression of the disease."

Jones said in an interview last week that his mother has been able to continue living on her own with the help of the Aricept medication, but that he visits her nightly to make sure she takes it and to help her with other needs.

Poignant scenes from families here and others across the country are interspersed throughout the show among explanations of Alzheimer's and descriptions of research efforts to slow, halt or reverse the disease. An estimated 5 million Americans have dementia, with the effects just as devastating for their caregivers, if not more so.

The Pittsburgh center shares top billing in the documentary with the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital, whose researchers collaborated with counterparts here in developing a potential breakthrough called the Pittsburgh Compound.

The local center's Dr. William Klunk, a psychiatrist, and Chester Mathis, a radiology professor, worked for a decade before achieving success in 2002 with the staining compound. It lets scientists see Alzheimer's plaques in living brain tissue, offering the potential with PET scans to monitor how effective different forms of medication or treatment might be.

DeKosky, 56, of Squirrel Hill, is prominent in the broadcast because he has long been an effective medical spokesman and research interpreter for the national Alzheimer's Association. He said he had no idea initially the Pitt center would become such a focus of "The Forgetting," but it certainly enhances its profile. Housed in UPMC Montefiore, the center has evaluated 3,000 individuals with the disease locally since 1985, including Gladys Fuget.

In an emotionally wrenching scene the 79-year-old woman is shown with her 6-year-old grandson, arguing on his level over details like being pushed on the swings at Westinghouse Park. She blames her husband for misplaced items and other problems, because individuals with her middle stage of Alzheimer's don't acknowledge having the disease.

Harry Fuget, who was shown a preview copy of the broadcast, will watch it again with his wife tomorrow night, and make sure his daughter and grandson see it as well. He hopes millions more learn something from the honest depiction of the couple's struggles.

"I didn't know anything about the disease until she was diagnosed," Fuget said. "I feel the more people that become aware of it, the better it'll be for everyone."