Vol. 1, Issue 10 (2012)

Author(s):
Abimbola Farinde

Abstract:
Dementia is considered to be a progressive, static, and remitting disease that is associated with changes in an individual’s personality, behavior, and mental abilities over time. The most common observable characteristic of dementia is the loss of memory and the skills that are needed to carry out everyday activities. There are various types of dementias (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease (AD), vascular disease, Lewy body dementia, Huntington’s disease, AIDs-Related Dementia, dementia caused by Parkinson’s disease, dementia cause by Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease etc., ), but the focus of this final paper will provide a concise overview of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or Alzheimer’s type dementia. Firstly, dementia has the ability to cause significant impairments as it relates to the performance activities of daily living and functioning. As it stands, dementia affects as many as 10% of people that are older than 65 years and more than 24% of those people that are older than 85 years of age. As the lifespan of humans continue to lengthen the incidence of dementia is increasing. With the progressive nature of dementia an individual may have about only 7 years to live after diagnosis. The history of Alzheimer’s disease stems from its description in 1901 by the German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer. He gave a lecture in 1960 that identified the unusual disease of the cerebral cortex that affected a woman in her fifties, Augustine D, which lead to memory loss, disorientation, hallucination, and eventually her death at the age of 55. As of today, the pathologic specifics of Alzheimer’s disease are still not clearly understood but the hypothesis is that it is attributed to the blockage of information by neurofibrillatory tangles. The presence of neurofibrillatory tangles, amyloid plaques, and neuron loss tend to occur throughout the brain with particularly prevalent in the medial temporal lobes.