History Of Alzheimer's Disease

Every day, every minute, experts in the health care fraternity and scientists are learning something new about the Alzheimer's disease. The impetus of research is growing, fuelling excitement and moving scientists a step closer to clearly comprehending the causes of Alzheimer's. Majority, if not all, of today's clinical discoveries are the outcome of basic science that has been researched and funded for several decades by the Alzheimer's Association.

Progressive mental deterioration in old age has been described and recognized ever since time immemorial. This is because elderly people suffer from different forms of senility, but it wasn't until the year 1906 when the disease was formally identified as an independent entity with its own characteristic symptoms and pathology. In 1901, Auguste D, a 51-year old woman, was admitted to the state asylum in Frankfurt suffering from language and cognitive deficits, delusions, auditory hallucinations, aggressive behavior, and paranoia.

Alois Alzheimer, who was a doctor at that hospital at the time, tended to the patient and by the time of her death in 1906, he had already moved to Munich medical school in 1903 to partner with Emil Kraepelin - who was one of the leading German psychiatrists at the time. The hospital in Frankfurt sent Alois the brain of the woman for examination upon which he studied the brain cell abnormalities and a year later, published his talk after presenting the woman's case at a psychiatry meeting.

Alzheimer's disease was given the name by Kraepelin, who named it after Alois Alzheimer, a name still used to refer to this common cause of senile dementia today. When Alois presented his original case of Auguste's cognitive and non-cognitive deficits, he reported that when doing post-mortem, he discovered tangles, plagues and arteriosclerotic changes in the deceased.

Ever since its discovery over 100 years ago, there have been many breakthroughs in the research of AD. During the 60s, scientists discovered a connection between cognitive decline and the amount of tangles and plagues in the brain. During the 70s, scientists made notable strides in comprehending the human body, where AD emerged as a significant scope of study.

As time goes by, and as technology advances, research methods too have advance where specific genes related to the early and late onset types of Alzheimer's have been identified. Because the genetic risk factors cannot single-handedly explain the cause of AD, researchers are exploring also the lifestyle and environment of patients to learn the role they are likely to play in the development of AD.

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