Alzheimers Disease :: Alzheimers Disease Essays

Alzheimers DiseaseIntroduction to AlzheimersAlzheimers unsoundness is a progressive degenerative disease of the wittiness.It is first described by the German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915)in 1905. This disease worsens with advancing age, although there is no evidencethat it is cause by the aging process.The average life expectancy of a person with the disease is between louvreand ten years, but some patients today can live up to 15 years due toimprovements in care and medical treatments. The cause of Alzheimers has nonbeen discovered yet and it cannot be possible to confirm a person hasAlzheimers until their autopsy following death.How does Alzheimers developWhat causes Alzheimers? Well no one know simply the development ofthis debilitating disease. But recent advances has produced several clues as tohow it is born. Initially when we study the brain of a Alzheimers victim, wefocus on 2 specific areas. wizard is the cortex of the frontal and cerebrallobes1. The s econd is the hippocampus (meaning seahorses in Greek which itresembles2) which is located below the cerebral cortex and responsible forshort-term memory. If we study samples of these two section, we would find threeirregularities which are not found in normal brain matter. These three arecalled neurofibrillary tangles, neuritic plagues and granulovacuolardegeneration3.A nerve cell has numerous axons and dendrites advent out of it. Aneurofibrillary tangle is when the nerve cell changes. A number of dendrites aremissing and the nucleus is filled with protein filaments resembling steel wool.Although all elderly people has a few of these helix shaped bundles intheir brain for they are normal indicators of aging, Alzheimers patients hasmore than usual. Their presence usually in the frontal and temporal lobes is a trace of AD.Senile neuritic plagues are small round objects. They are masses ofamyloid protein material composed of residue left over from healthy nerveendings that were unkept off and decayed. Their presence near the cell furtherindicates something gone wrong. Neuritic plaques is the best evidence fordiagnostics to make the determination of AD.A third sign of neuron deterioration is granulovacuolar degeneration.This is when fluid-filled vacuoles are seen crowding inside the nerve cell,specifically in the triangular shaped cells of the hippocampus. This conditioncan only be observed in carefully sliced, stain and analyzed brain tissue.The cell having lost all its dendrites and nucleus soon disintegratesentirely, vanishing into the bodys waste disposal system. With the depletion ofenough nerve material the brain actually shrinks, sometimes by as much as tenpercent5. The more cells the AD sufferer loses, the more mental functions he