June is Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month. To help spread public awareness and to honor the millions of people living with Alzheimer’s, we want to know:
What is Alzheimer’s disease?
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was first identified by Alois Alzheimer in 1906 in his patient, Frau Auguste D. Dr. Alzheimer saw Frau D. Dr. Alzheimer saw Frau D in 1901 and observed her rather striking symptoms that normally would have been described as “senile dementia.” It would have been called this in her case as well, except for the fact that she was in her early 50s when Alzheimer saw her. She displayed severe memory dysfunction, problems speaking and understanding words (aphasia), an inability to perform skilled movements (apraxia), hallucinations (false perceptions), and delusions (false beliefs). Alzheimer performed a postmortem examination of her brain and found that it contained abnormal proteins (beta-amyloid plaques) and changes in neural structures (neurofilbrillary tangles inside neurons, or nerve cells). Although this was discovered in 1906 and named by Emil Kraepelin in 1910, AD was not given a great deal of attention for decades. Even as late as 1970, noted psychologist Brendan Maher commented in his book, _Principles of Psychopathology, _that AD was not found with any significant frequency in the population and was thus of little interest to psychopathology students. As a result of the significant increase in the lifespan of adults in the developed world, however, the incidence of AD has grown significantly, and AD has become of tremendous interest to health care professionals and nonprofessionals alike. Currently, AD affects 5.4 million people in the United States, and 44 million worldwide have been diagnosed with AD or another dementia, with the vast majority of the cost of AD going to nursing home care and care at home (Hurd et al., 2013).
Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Steven R. Sabat, pages 18-19
Image credit: “Brain Human Anatomy” by sbtlneet. CC0 via Pixabay
