Alzheimer’s Disease Information

Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that causes several body problems including memory problems, thinking problems and behavioural problems. It is one of the most common causes of dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is named after a doctor who first described the disease and called it. The Doctor’s name was Alois Alzheimer.

The condition is different from normal forgetfulness in which a person forgets about a particular place or person’s name, but if the individual forgets his name and forgets the places well known to him, then this is different from normal forgetfulness.

Symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease

The typical symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease may vary from mild to worse. It is critical to know that the patients with Alzheimer’s disease may show different Alzheimer’s symptoms.  The major difficulty that arises with this illness is the memory loss.  The memory loss interferes with the daily life.

The early and later symptoms may vary in the severity. The first signs are:

• Difficulty in remembering ordinary things
• Losing things like keys and glasses in the house
• Quickly being lost in well-known places
• Confusion of time and location of being
• Pressure to perform straightforward mathematical calculations

The signs of later stages of Alzheimer’s:

• Inability to remember the way to brush the teeth or comb hairs
• Inability to remember their house location
• Difficult to remember the names of simple things
• Confusion about time and place
• Changes in mood and behaviour
• Poor judgmental qualities etc.

Changes in brain during Alzheimer’s disease:

According to various scientists, there are about 100 million nerve cells in our brain, and they work together to make the brain functioning perfect. The brain nerve cells work to send the signals from the brain to different parts of the body. Alzheimer’s disease is known to interfere with the functioning of the brain nerve cells or the nervous system.

During the ageing process and Alzheimer’s disease, two abnormal structures called plaques and tangles are formed that damage the nerve cells.

• Plaques are formed up of beta-amyloidal protein
• Tangles are made up of another protein called tau protein

The destruction and death of the nerve cells with the build up of these proteins causes the Alzheimer’s disease and other symptoms dementia.

Who is at the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease?

There are a few common risk factors that can initiate the beginning of Alzheimer’s illness and they are:

1. Age problem: it is one of the biggest risk factors. In the people above the age of 65 years are at a danger of getting AD, and the risk keep on increasing every five years. More than 17% of people above the age of 80 years.
2. Gender: it is not clearly known the reason behind the cause of the disease in women, still at least twice number of women suffers AD in comparison to men who reaches the age of 65. Women live longer than men, and this fact confuses with the maximum cases of women who suffer from AD. Research is being done on whether oestrogen hormone lack post menopause is the primary reason for the cause of AD in ageing women.
3. Family history or heredity: Yet another risk factor. People who have close ones or relatives with AD are more likely to get the disease.
4. Genetic makeup: two genes are related to developing Alzheimer’s disease.

The risk genes, APOE-e gene, APOE-e4 or APOE-e 2or APOE-e3, are known to cause a risk to develop the Alzheimer’s disease, in case, two copies of this gene are inherited.

The deterministic genes are very rare and found only in the few extended families of the world.

Some other risk factors are:

There are a few other causes of memory problem that arises with Alzheimer’s disease:

1. Medicinal side effect
2. Depression
3. Consuming too much alcohol
4. Blood clot or tumor
5. Unwholesome Diet
6. Head injury
7. Liver problem
8. Kidney problem etc.

Diagnosis:

No such test can examine the presence of Alzheimer’s disease.  The patient’s condition  is usually diagnosed with the help of a few common tests including the analysis of the symptoms, some neurological tests and a few physical tests such as:

• Blood pressure check
• Weight check
• Urine test
• Blood test
• Pulse rate check etc.

Treatments for  Alzheimer’s disease:

There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease up to this date. The scientist is still working on finding the ways to prevent the damage of nerve cells in the brain. A few drugs are available to control the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and they are FDA approved also. The Alzheimer’s medication list is as follows:

• Donepezil
• Rivastigmine
• Galantamine
• Memantine

These Alzheimer drugs are available online also, in case you find difficulty in finding the drugs in your locality. Although Alzheimer’s is an incurable problem, still there are a lot of things that can be done to improve the condition of the patient.  The Alzheimer reviews show that drugs, support and more physical and mental activeness of the patient can improve the status of the patient to several folds.