TV Reviews : ‘Losing It All’ Details Impact of Alzheimer’s

“Losing It All: The Reality of Alzheimer’s Disease” (tonight at 10 on HBO and repeated through November) is a devastatingly painful look at the disease’s terrible effect on victims and their loved ones.

Shot in documentary fashion with a minimum of commentary by producer-director-writer Michael Mierendorf and Princess Yasmin Aga Khan (whose mother, Rita Hayworth, was an Alzheimer’s victim), “Losing It All” looks at five families in which the disease, which destroys the brain and erodes the memory, has been a devastating intruder.

The program doesn’t report on the status of medical research. Rather, it lets its achingly painful pictures speak for themselves.

Alzheimer’s, for which there is no cure and from which there is no recovery, has been called the cruelest disease. This program only underscores that notion.