Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer is the most common form of dementia. About 70% of people with dementia have Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's often starts insidiously with memory disorders. As the disease progresses, the person with Alzheimer's loses more and more skills and eventually becomes completely dependent on others.

Alzheimer's  Disease

Alzheimer's disease symptoms

When your loved one is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, she usually suffers from memory disorders for some time. It is increasingly difficult to remember new information. For example, she asks the same thing a few times a day and forgets appointments. Older memories are more easily accessible to her. These symptoms characterize the stage before diagnosis and the first period after. When your neighbor is still relatively young, the memory problems in this first phase are sometimes not so noticeable. The striking signs are, for example, that someone does not maintain her house as well, or is more careless than before.

As the disease progresses, everything you have to keep your mind up is more and more difficult: following a conversation, making plans, sorting things out, solving problems, assessing situations and making decisions. Eventually, the knowledge that had been in the memory for a long time also disappears.

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Other Alzheimer's disease symptoms include:

Language disorders: your neighbor has more and more difficulties to find, use and understand words (aphasia).

Visual-spatial disorders: your neighbor no longer recognizes her surroundings well and gets lost in places that were well known to her.

Disturbed experience of time: your neighbor no longer knows what day, month or year it is. Also clocking or a global sense of time (morning, afternoon, evening) is becoming increasingly difficult.

Your neighbor no longer recognizes objects and sounds and no longer knows what they are for or where they come from (agnosia).

Your neighbor can perform more and more difficult tasks, such as dressing and undressing. She has difficulty with the sequence of actions to achieve a result (apraxia).

Changes in character: Your neighbor can become suspicious, restless or aggressive. She can also become more lethargic (apathy). In the latter case, she withdraws, becomes more indifferent, loses interest in the environment and devotes less attention to her personal care.

Causes of Alzheimer's disease

In Alzheimer's disease, a number of proteins, the so-called beta-amyloid, build up in the nerve cells of the brain. The breakdown of this protein is not going well. Researchers think that accumulations of this protein ("plaques") destroy the nerve cells and the connections between these nerve cells. There is also a kind of tangle of thread-like proteins (tangles) in the nerve cells themselves. These make the normal functioning of the nerve cell impossible, which causes the cell to die.

Heredity Alzheimer's

In most cases, Alzheimer's is not hereditary. Heredity only plays a role in some cases. Usually this concerns a certain genetic form of Alzheimer's at an early age. Read more about heredity in dementia.

Course of Alzheimer's

In the beginning you often don't notice much about your neighbor. The symptoms become clearer as the dementia progresses. For some people, the decline is very rapid, while others can live relatively ordinary lives for years to come. Ultimately, your loved one with dementia can no longer function independently and she increasingly needs help from others. In the final stage, the powers of someone with Alzheimer's decrease so much that generalized debilitation can be the cause of death. In the last phase there are often problems with swallowing, which can cause respiratory infections, or balance problems, which can lead to serious fall accidents. No cure could yet be found for Alzheimer's disease.

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