Alzheimer’s disease is a specific sort of neurological disorder that impairs memory and tampers with various other integral mental functions. Similar to disorders of the like, Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, essentially intensifying in severity as time continues. In 1999, approximately four million geriatrics in America alone were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Even with these staggeringly high numbers, the rate of incidence for the disease shows no signs of decelerating as experts expect this statistic to triple to by the year 2020 (Altman 9). The reason for this trend may lie in the most common cause of Alzheimer’s itself: old age. While old age in every human is not enough to cause Alzheimer’s, an amalgamation of specific lifestyle, environmental, …show more content…
Neurologists have narrowed down the mere diagnosis of Alzheimer’s to two specific protein indicators known as beta-amyloid and tau, both of which can be isolated from the cerebrospinal fluid. The most common paradigm that identifies Alzheimer’s disease involves examining the fluid for an aberrant amount of both beta-amyloid and tau. Because of the protein oversaturation in the cerebrospinal fluid, and therefore the brain, plaques and tangles are likely to be the primary suspect of neuron death in patients with Alzheimer’s. Although not a surefire way to detect the disease in elderly patients with a possible multitude of other medical conditions, this method of diagnosis does in fact help identify who have the possibility of adopting a more severe form of Alzheimer’s (Mayo Staff …show more content…
Unique to its kind, Alzheimer’s is a distinct form of dementia, an alternative and more generalized condition that entails the partial, or even total, loss of intellectual function. Specific symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease involve the destruction of separate memory capacities and often result in rapid vacillations in behavior, reminiscent of an almost bipolar-like state (Altman 8). Unfortunately, the progression of Alzheimer’s leads to increasingly significant losses in memory. Similar to that of common belief, short-term memory is the first type of memory to dissipate. Short-term memory involves the information that one processes in real-time. Often with the onset of Alzheimer’s, researchers find that patients have trouble remembering what they did only a mere 20 minutes in the past. Following the memory loss often is a consequent degradation in skills involving judgment and reasoning. Those diagnosed with the condition may lose the ability to think through relatively pedestrian problems. In normal aging, the decline in this rate of processing skill is almost absent (Altman 20). As the disease propagates, additional aspects of human memory are compromised, including that of episodic, semantic, and even procedural memory (“Alzheimer’s Disease – Memory Disorders”). The deterioration of these facets of memory can