The ancient Greeks first recognized Alzheimer’s but it had no name then Shakespeare wrote about old age as “Second childishness and mere oblivion”.
In the early 20th century when Alois Alzheimer, a German physician, described the signs of the disease in the brain. He had a patient in her fifties who suffered from what seemed to be a mental illness. When she died in 1906 autopsy revealed dense deposits called neurotic plaques outside and around nerve cells in her brain inside the cells were twisted strands of fibre called neurofibrillary tangles . Today a definite diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is not possible until an autopsy has been carried out.
These plaques and tangles remained unknown substances until the 1980s when scientists who study the brain discovered proteins that make patients often live for years with this condition, dying eventually from other diseases.
The duration of Alzheimer’s disease from the time of diagnosis to death can be twenty years or more. Although the average range is from 4 to 8 years.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia among older people. It is recognized by progressive irreversible declines in memory, performance of routine tasks, time and space orientation, language and communication skills, abstract thinking and the ability to carry out maths calculation like algebra and adding.
Senile dementia was a term once used to describe any form of dementia in old people.
Research into Alzheimer’s continues but there is still no known cure.
