Alzheimers disease

Essay by samm9887High School, 11th gradeA+, February 2005

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Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, irreversible brain disorder with no known cause or cure. It attacks and slowly steals the minds of its victims. It stops the person from forming accurate perceptions of the world around them. Symptoms of the disease include memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, personality changes, disorientation, and loss of language skills. The first symptoms of Alzheimer's may be hard to tell from the normal signs of aging; forgetting names, forgetting phone numbers, losing things more often. People may accept these as a normal part of aging. When they affect daily life, they may be early symptoms of Alzheimer's. Always fatal, Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of irreversible dementia. Dementia is chronic loss of mental capacity due to an organic cause. Dementia may involve progressive deterioration of thinking, memory, behavior, personality and motor function, and may also be associated with psychological symptoms such as depression and apathy.

Alzheimer's is a specific disease associated with the breakdown of nervous tissue in the brain, and that's why it gives rise to a dementia in the patient. This seems to be one of the most common conditions of older people in world. It is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease characterized in the brain by abnormal clumps and tangled bundles of fibers composed of misplaced proteins. Although the person may not be fully functional when they have the disease, they can last up to twenty years. Normally the disease doesn't get bad until the person has it for a few years.

Approximately 100,000 victims die and 360,000 new cases of Alzheimer's disease are diagnosed each year. It is estimated that by 2050, 14 million Americans will have this disease. America is not alone in dealing with this terrible affliction. In every nation where life expectancy has increased, so has...