Research Paper On Alzheimer's Disease

Words: 737
Pages: 3

Alzheimer's disease is a type of brain dementia that's usually terminal and what's interesting about it is that the rate of which the person declines or the progression of the disease is usually quite variable. The early signs of Alzheimer's are:
- Short-term memory loss and difficulty in attaining new Information.
- Decreased abstract thinking, mental flexibility, planning abilities: they can't plan things as well, they lose what's called executive function in their life.
- Decline in fine motor skills, handwriting starts to decline significantly or the ability to dress oneself.

As the disease progresses, you see the more obvious signs like confusion, disorientation personality changes with sometimes irritability or aggression, uncharacteristic
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### How common is the problem?

Alzheimer's disease is now the sixth leading cause of death in the Western world, one in eight people 65 years and older has Alzheimer's disease. Nearly 50% of people over the age of 85 has Alzheimer's disease and those people with Alzheimer's disease, only 4% occurs in people under the age of 65, another 6% is in people 65 to 74 and after 74, there's a huge jump. 45% of people between 75 and 84 that's where 45% percent of the Alzheimer's cases are and 45% percent of people above 85 also have Alzheimer's disease.

Age is a major risk factor but the other thing is this, after age 65, 10 to 20% percent of people also have just mild cognitive impairment, they don't have Alzheimer's or a serious dimension but they're already losing cognitive
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Vascular dementia: This can occur when you clog your arteries up with too much fat and cholesterol, your homocysteine levels are too high. This is more modifiable if you keep your cholesterol down and do the right things for your cardiovascular system, you're going to be less prone to get vascular dementia and often with vascular, dementia there's some mini strokes that occur along the way sometimes that are occurring without people realizing.

3. Mixed: Mixed form of dementia is where you have a combination of sort of classical Alzheimer's and vascular dementia.

On the large macroscopic level, what's happening in the brain and Alzheimer's disease when you starve, nerve cells are dying and the connections between nerve cells the synapses are sort of falling off so the transmission of nerve information starts to drop and with that you're getting a shrinking of some of the key brain centers like the temporal lobe, parietal lobe and the frontal lobe where a lot of sort of cognitive function occurs as well as an area called the cingulate gyros.

What's fascinating to me is what happens at a microscopic level right in the nerve cell itself. Nerve cells stop producing optimal amounts of a memory chemical called acetylcholine, this happens in every one of us as we get older we make less