German psychiatrist Dr. Aloysius Alzheimer identified and published the first case study of a woman with unusual symptoms that included language problems, paranoia, memory loss and unpredictable behavior. In 1906 Alzheimer named the condition “pre-senile dementia”, but his colleague later renamed the disorder as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). During the years that Dr. Alzheimer studied dimentia he was able to prepare over 200 slides from the brain of a middle-aged woman who had died in a Frankfurt Germany asylum. These slides of brain material, which were once believed to have been lost forever, were uncovered in 1997 at the University of Munich. A team of scientists examined the slides and found the key indicators of the disease were amyloidal …show more content…
Currently there are over 44 million people around the world who have dementia or AD and it is expected that by the year 2050 that number will triple. It is rare for a person to show signs of Alzheimer’s before the age of 40; however the youngest person to have ever been diagnosed with this disease was only 27 years of age (agingcarefl.org). Although the signs of AD come on gradually, it is always due to the death of the patient’s brain cells and the connectors between them. Because the symptoms are always progressive the result is the death of the patient. A proper diagnosis for AD is important because there are many other causes of dementia including; encephalitis, syphilis, hydrocephalus, depression, B-12 deficiency, thyroid disorder, blood clots in the brain, and liver-kidney failure just to name a few. A thorough medical evaluation, which includes laboratory tests, brain scans, and a physical examination, are all important diagnostic tools since the disease is always fatal. The family members of the Alzheimer’s victims are also casualties of the disease in the sense that stress, extremely high medical costs and the changing needs of the patient are always present and