Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a form of dementia, as dementia is an overarching term for the deterioration of one’s mental ability serious enough to restrict daily life activities. This disease is extremely dependent upon one’s age and develops over several years. Many people consider the early symptoms of AD as typical signs of aging such as being easily confused and having minor, sporadic memory loss. These characteristics eventually worsen, impairing cognitive abilities like language skills and decision making. An intense loss of all mental function then occurs and correlates to the decline in breakdown of specific brain neuron connections. All of this compounds, leading to the eventual death of the affected person. AD is the most common …show more content…
The prognosis of AD tends to be considered poor, as nothing has been proven to slow the progression of the disease (although present-day research is focusing heavily on that). The Alzheimer’s Association reports that “among people age 70, 61 percent of those with Alzheimer's are expected to die before the age of 80 compared with 30 percent of people without Alzheimer’s” ("2016 ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE”). An individual does not have a great chance of surviving to very old age with AD because it will eventually worsen to the point of death, if nothing else causes death sooner. Medications can help affected people maintain their thoughts, memory, or speaking skills, in addition to reverting some personality changes that naturally come with the disease back to normal. Some current approaches to treatment continue to focus on the maintenance of mental function and management of behavioral symptoms using medication, while also slowing progression by targeting the underlying disease process. Medication is not effective for everyone and only helps in the short term which can range anywhere from a month or two to a few years. The four FDA-approved medications are Aricept, Exelon, Razadyne, and Namenda which work to regulate neurotransmitters. …show more content…
Precision medicine “takes into account individual variability in environment, lifestyle, and genes for each person” in terms of both disease treatment and prevention ("About the Precision Medicine Initiative”). The goal of the PMI is to have over a million volunteers that will expand and apply precision medicine to all diseases. This initiative could improve the treatment of AD as it is geared more towards the method of individualized medicine and away from the ‘one-size-fits all’ approach. This could reveal more connections between genes and environment, which could then lead to more specialized treatment options for people instead of generalizing treatments. Entirely new treatment options might emerge which would be helpful seeing as there are none thus far that slow down the progression of the disease or work in the