29 Facts About Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens.

The Alzheimer's disease process is largely associated with amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, and loss of neuronal connections in the brain.

The Alzheimer's disease is named after German psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer, who first described it in 1906.

Alzheimer's disease is currently ranked as the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.

Course of Alzheimer's disease is generally described in three stages, with a progressive pattern of cognitive and functional impairment.

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The Alzheimer's disease is known to target the hippocampus which is associated with memory, and this is responsible for the first symptoms of memory impairment.

In people with Alzheimer's disease, the increasing impairment of learning and memory eventually leads to a definitive diagnosis.

Alzheimer's disease is believed to occur when abnormal amounts of amyloid beta, accumulating extracellularly as amyloid plaques and tau proteins, or intracellularly as neurofibrillary tangles, form in the brain, affecting neuronal functioning and connectivity, resulting in a progressive loss of brain function.

Oldest hypothesis, on which most drug therapies are based, is the cholinergic hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer's disease is caused by reduced synthesis of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

Early onset familial Alzheimer's disease can be attributed to mutations in one of three genes: those encoding amyloid-beta precursor protein and presenilins PSEN1 and PSEN2.

Japanese pedigree of familial Alzheimer's disease was found to be associated with a deletion mutation of codon 693 of APP.

Retrogenesis is a medical hypothesis that just as the fetus goes through a process of neurodevelopment beginning with neurulation and ending with myelination, the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease go through a reverse neurodegeneration process starting with demyelination and death of axons and ending with the death of grey matter.

Likewise the hypothesis is, that as infants go through states of cognitive development, people with Alzheimer's disease go through the reverse process of progressive cognitive impairment.

Alzheimer's disease is characterised by loss of neurons and synapses in the cerebral cortex and certain subcortical regions.

Alzheimer's disease has been identified as a protein misfolding disease, a proteopathy, caused by the accumulation of abnormally folded amyloid beta protein into amyloid plaques, and tau protein into neurofibrillary tangles in the brain.

Alzheimer's disease is considered a tauopathy due to abnormal aggregation of the tau protein.

FDA-approved radiopharmaceutical diagnostic agents used in PET for Alzheimer's disease are florbetapir, flutemetamol, florbetaben, and flortaucipir .

For mild neurocognitive disorder due to Alzheimer's, probable Alzheimer's disease can be diagnosed if there is genetic evidence, whereas possible Alzheimer's disease can be met if all of the following are present: no genetic evidence, decline in both learning and memory, two or more cognitive deficits, and a functional disability not from another disorder.

Additionally, because women have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease than men, it was once thought that estrogen deficiency during menopause was a risk factor.

Alzheimer's disease is associated with sleep disorders but the precise relationship is unclear.

Medications used to treat the cognitive problems of Alzheimer's disease include: four acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine, an NMDA receptor antagonist.

Since Alzheimer's has no cure and it gradually renders people incapable of tending to their own needs, caregiving is essentially the treatment and must be carefully managed over the course of the disease.

Pneumonia and dehydration are the most frequent immediate causes of death brought by Alzheimer's disease, while cancer is a less frequent cause of death than in the general population.

Females with Alzheimer's disease are more common than males, but this difference is likely due to women's' longer life spans.

The disease was first described as a distinctive disease by Emil Kraepelin after suppressing some of the clinical and pathological features contained in the original report of Auguste D He included Alzheimer's disease, named presenile dementia by Kraepelin, as a subtype of senile dementia in the eighth edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry, published on 1910.

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The terminology changed after 1977 when a conference on Alzheimer's disease concluded that the clinical and pathological manifestations of presenile and senile dementia were almost identical, although the authors added that this did not rule out the possibility that they had different causes.

Alzheimer's disease is known for placing a great burden on caregivers which includes social, psychological, physical, or economic aspects.

Documentaries on Alzheimer's disease include Malcolm and Barbara: A Love Story and Malcolm and Barbara: Love's Farewell, both featuring Malcolm Pointon.

Alzheimer's disease has been portrayed in music by English musician the Caretaker in releases such as Persistent Repetition of Phrases, An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, and Everywhere at the End of Time .