Alzheimer's disease and risky sexual behavior?

No..it's a false alarm. [***or not - see note added at end of post]

But I had to do a double-take last night when reading my e-mail notification of the new HealthCentral newsletter with the subject line:

Celebrate Alzheimer's Awareness Month; How risky is your sexual behavior?

For the grammar police out there, this is a great example of the difference in meaning of a semi-colon vs. a colon. However, given the size of the print on my screen and my pending need for bifocals, I couldn't tell the difference.

Anyway, I blame the editors of the e-mail release for alarming me.

Or maybe it was intentional. After all, I've written a blog post about it and linked to their site.

On the more serious side, Alzheimer's is a terribly devastating disease that is only due to increase in incidence as baby boomers move toward their more senior years.

For those interested, the links to the two separate stories are:

Celebrate Alzheimer's Awareness Month
Learn about the symptoms of Alzheimer's, the struggles of caregiving, and take our Alzheimer's IQ Test! Educate yourself, in honor of the 5 million Americans suffering from Alzheimer's Disease.

How risky is your sexual behavior?
Everyone knows you can't judge a book by its cover - but neither can you judge someone's sexual health by their good looks and charm. Take this quiz to find out whether or not you're taking the right precautions in your sex life.

***Note added 16 Nov 2007: Evil Monkey at Neurotopia 2.0 notes that there may indeed actually be a link between sexual behavior and risk of Alzheimer's. It's a great read - who knew?

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Don't blame your interpretation of the email's headline on your eyes. The capital 'H' would be appropriate iff (and only iff) the punctuation mark had been a colon. After a semi-colon, the editors of the email should have used an 'h'. So no wonder you thought the two phrases were linked.

Grammar discussion aside, though, I highly recommended Evil Monkey's post (as noted above). Turns out the truth is more complex--and considerably more interesting--that the email's editors probably realize.