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Research Paper On Alzheimer's Disease

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Alzheimer's disease Might Find Its Cure Soon

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia that affects over five million American each year. It is a memory loss that occurs due to age or other diseases. About 60 to 80% of people living with dementia are believed to have Alzheimer.

The main pointer and heart rendering consequence of Alzheimer’s disease is memory loss - but memory loss does not always mean Alzheimer. There are many other factors such as trauma that can be responsible for memory loss. However, once Alzheimer’s starts developing, memories start to decline in episodes. That is, memories of personal experiences – events, time, place and emotional state - start to fade. According to the Mayo Clinic, “In Alzheimer’s disease, …show more content…
However, the muddy part of the study of Alzheimer’s disease is finding out what part of the memory is disrupted in an Alzheimer's patient. Usually, recent memories are the first to be forgotten, therefore, the ability to save new information is seen as the most compromised aspect of memory mechanisms in Alzheimer’s patients - at least in its early stages.

Although some studies support this hypothesis, it is not an easy thing to determine beyond doubt with currently available tools. This is why the questions, "How can we be sure if a memory was not stored, or if it is just inaccessible?" has been hatched over and over again; and bypassing the process of memory recall to check if a memory is stored is not an easy …show more content…
A recently published study in Nature throws more light into the mechanisms of memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s and brings a light at the end of the tunnel type of possibility that lost memories may be recoverable.

The main purpose of the research was to find out if memories are absent, or just unreachable. The group of researchers from the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory set about their research using a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease.

They designed a simple yet absolutely enlightening experiment:
Two groups of mice were genetically engineered to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms - one with early-stage Alzheimer’s, the other with an advanced version of the disease.
Another group of healthy mice was placed in a chamber where they received a shock to the foot.

When placed in the same chamber after an hour of the initial foot shock, both the healthy and early-stage Alzheimer’s mice displayed fear. Meaning both could still recall the earlier shock to the foot; whereas the advanced-stage Alzheimer’s mice did not display fear. This shows that those with early-stage symptoms could still encode and store memories on a short-term time frame unlike those with advanced-stage

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