Ted Turner Died of Lewy Body Dementia. Here's What the Disease Actually Does.
Ted Turner, the media mogul who founded CNN and TBS, died on May 6 at 87 after an eight-year battle with Lewy body dementia. Turner Enterprises confirmed the news Wednesday.
Turner first went public with his diagnosis back in 2018 in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning. He described feeling tired and exhausted all the time and said the symptom that bothered him most was the forgetfulness. He lived with the disease for nearly a decade after that conversation — which actually puts him on the longer end of what's typical for this diagnosis.
What Lewy Body Dementia Is
Most people haven't heard of it, but it's not rare. Lewy body dementia — LBD for short — is the second most common form of progressive dementia behind Alzheimer's. It happens when abnormal protein deposits called Lewy bodies build up inside brain cells and start damaging the parts of the brain that control thinking, memory, and movement.
From diagnosis to death, people typically live anywhere from two to twenty years. That's a wide range, and it reflects how differently the disease can progress from person to person.
Robin Williams had it. Baseball legend Tom Seaver had it. Most people didn't know until after they were gone — which is part of why the disease stays so underrecognized despite how many people it affects.
What It Actually Feels Like
The symptom list for LBD is longer and stranger than most people expect. Memory loss and confusion are there, like Alzheimer's. But LBD also brings hallucinations — often vivid and detailed ones. Slowed movement, rigid muscles, and tremors show up, similar to Parkinson's. Sleep gets disrupted in specific ways. Attention fluctuates wildly — someone can seem relatively alert and then suddenly be staring blankly into space or falling asleep mid-afternoon for hours. Depression and apathy are common. The body's automatic functions can start misfiring too — blood pressure, temperature regulation, digestion.
Turner described his experience as exhaustion and forgetfulness. That's the public-facing version. Behind the scenes, the disease tends to be considerably more disorienting than that.
Why It Takes So Long to Diagnose
This is one of the cruelest parts of LBD. Because it shares symptoms with both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's — two completely different diseases — doctors frequently mistake it for one or the other. Norma Loeb, founder of the Lewy Body Dementia Resource Center, has said it's not unusual for the correct diagnosis to take one to three years from when symptoms first appear.
That delay matters because LBD patients are extremely sensitive to certain medications. The drugs that might seem like an obvious choice — particularly older antipsychotics — can actually make things significantly worse in someone with LBD, amplifying hallucinations and causing dangerous reactions. Getting the diagnosis wrong and treating it wrong is a real and serious risk.
Loeb advises families to track every symptom carefully — even ones that seem unrelated — because with LBD almost nothing is actually unrelated.
What Treatment Looks Like
There's no cure. There's no way to stop the protein buildup or reverse the damage. What exists is symptom management — a careful balancing act that has to be tailored to each patient because of how sensitive LBD patients are to medications.
Some drugs used for Alzheimer's, particularly cholinesterase inhibitors, can help with cognition and alertness in LBD patients. Some Parkinson's medications can help with the movement symptoms. But every medication decision carries risk and needs to be made with a neurologist who knows the disease well.
Ted Turner lived with this for eight years before it took him. He was 87. He built two cable networks and donated a billion dollars to the United Nations and spent his final years quietly losing the thing that made him who he was — his mind.
That's what Lewy body dementia does. It takes a long time and it doesn't give anything back.
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