Alzheimer s Disease ( Ad ) - 1067 Words

Imagine going to the corner store that you have gone to for the past twenty years, once there, you forget how to get home. Imagine going to your grandson’s football game, once there, you forget that your grandson is the boy wearing the number seven on his jersey. Imagine being hungry, going into the kitchen and putting a pot of soup on the stove, once there you forget you are hungry and decide to go to bed. This is life with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a brain disease that slowly eradicates recollection, thinking skills and slowly the ability to perform menial tasks. Alzheimer’s disease is classified as the loss of cognitive functioning-thinking, remembering, and reasoning- and behavioral abilities to such an†¦show more content†¦The distinction between the different forms of dementia and AD is marked by the course of the disease’s progression. Alzheimer’s disease was named after Dr. Alois Alzheimer, who in 1906 diagnosed changes in the mental status of one of his patients, before and after death, upon dissection of her brain. The symptoms included memory loss, language problems, unpredictable behaviors and mental acuity difficulty. Observing the cross section of a healthy brain and one of an AD patient indicate atrophy of brain tissue. The location of the shrinking indicates the severity of the type of dementia and magnitude of AD. The beginning stages of AD usually take place in the hippocampus portion of the brain. This is the region of the brain where memories are formed. During the atrophy of the disease this area begins to shrink and throughout the duration of the disease it shrinks to the point where this region has little to no functionality. Memory problems are the first signs of cognitive impairment related to Alzheimer’s disease. (**4) However, the symptoms vary from person to person. It does not necessarily have to memory that is an initial symptom. The majority of dementia takes place in the brain. It is the location in the area of the brain atrophy as well as the amount of the brain that is affected that produce patient symptoms. The brain’s 100 billion nerve cells (neurons)