What Is Alzheimer's Disease?

Modern diseases seem to get more and more complicated and for some of them we do not even know how and why they attack a person. All that we know is what the disease does to a person and sometimes we know how to treat it. There is still a question that is not really answered i.e. what is Alzheimer's disease. We however do know about the consequences.

Dementia is the most common form of Alzheimer's disease amongst older people. It is a brain disorder and it initially involves different parts of the brain. These are parts that control speech and language, memory, especially short term memory and the whole process of thinking.

The number of people that suffer from health problems connected with Alzheimer's disease is rising every day, because we have more and more old people, and the Alzheimer's is connected to aging. In the US, there are more than 4.5 million people suffering from Alzheimer's. It is directly connected to the age of a person, because the statistics say that only 5% of people in the age group 65 to 74 have Alzheimer's, but almost half the people from the age 85 and above have it. We are not saying that Alzheimer's disease is a normal part of the aging process, but it affects elderly people mostly. There are also cases of young people having it.

The Alzheimer's was first discovered in 1906 and is named after the doctor, who first noticed different changes in the brain of patients, who died of mental illnesses, that they considered unusual at that time. He discovered different clumps and bundles in the brains of the deceased. They are today considered as signs of Alzheimer's. The brain shrinks to a much smaller size than the normal and on top of that, the spaces that are normally filled with a fluid in our brain grow bigger, that means that the combined size of the brain is even smaller than it looks like. The biggest problem is that not only parts of the brain are attacked by the disease, but the whole brain, and that means different body functions are limited. We still do not have an effective treatment of the disease. There are drugs that can help, but they will not stop the disease. The drugs will make life easier for the patient and the care-takers; because the patient will be independent for some more time, and will be able to perform every day acts without help. The research now focuses on ways to discover the disease early. Neuroimaging is a procedure that the researchers believe will help to find the changes in the patient's brain faster and more accurately. With this method all the medication will start earlier and good conditions for a longer, better life will be established.

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