Understanding Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer is a type of dementia disease that is the most common among others because it accounts 60 of 80 dementia cases. In the United States, Alzheimer is the top six causes of death. This disease attacks your brain cells and forms an eraser that will erase your memories slowly. This losing memory will make you difficult to think properly and this will affect on your behavior in daily life.

At the beginning, the symptoms may be not clearly noticeable, but over time, this disease will be worse and worse. The average life of people with Alzheimer is eight years after the diagnosis, but the survival may differ from one person to the other with range from four to twenty years. All of that depend on the patient health conditions and of course, age. Up until now, there is no medicine that can cure this disease. What we can do is just taking some treatments and medications to ease the symptoms. Researchers around the world try their best to find the right medication to cure Alzheimer patients.

The one that you should understand is that Alzheimer’s disease is not a normal part of aging that all old people may experience. Although increasing age is one of the factors causing Alzheimer and the majority people with Alzheimer are at 65 years old, people in younger age may also experience this disease, usually called younger-onset.  Besides increasing age, causes of Alzheimer are so many such as vitamin deficiencies and thyroid problems. Knowing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s is also important to prevent this dementia disease. Some symptoms indicated Alzheimer’s disease such as losing memories and having difficulties to remember something easy like name, address, and appointment at the beginning then they will worsen, maybe until the person cannot do anything themselves.

There are seven stages that will show you how the changes of ability happened in a person with Alzheimer according to Barry Reisberg, M.D. The first is no impairment or normal function where the person with Alzheimer has not feel any problems of losing memories or difficulty in thinking, even when interviewing with medical professional, they may get no evidences of Alzheimer during this stage. The second is very mild cognitive decline where the patient may experience normal changes like forgetting words and locations that are familiar for them before which can be easily identified by friend or family around them.

The third is mild cognitive decline where the patient may experience noticeable difficulties related to memory and concentration like remembering name and planning something. The fourth is moderate cognitive decline where the doctor can easily detect clear-cut symptoms of the patient while they are doing medical interview, for example the patients forgets recent events happened in their life. The fifth is moderately severe cognitive decline where the gaps of memory and thinking are easily to notice and the patients started to do anything with the help of others day by day. The sixth is severe cognitive decline where patients’ memories continue to worsen and they need extensive help doing daily activities.

The last stage is very severe cognitive decline where the patients’ are fully losing their response to the environments, even they may still say some short words or phrases. These seven steps may help you understand Alzheimer’s disease better and how they get worsen over time. But, the one you should remember is that all those stages are just theory, at the field, patient may experience more than those. So, understanding the disease well is good, not only for medical team but also for the family that they will be more ease in taking care of people with Alzheimer.