An Overview of Alzheimer's Disease

            According to statistics, about 3 percent of men and women ages 65 to 74 and nearly half of those 85 and older have Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is a chronic disease, which starts slowly and get worse over time and no recovery. The disease will slowly attack the nerve cell in the parts of the cortex of the brain, thus impairing person's abilities to govern emotions, recognize errors and patterns, coordinate movement, and remember. How do people find they have this disease and how will the disease be treated by people? Alzheimer identified the first case of this disease. A fifty-year-old woman, who was his patient, he called her Auguste D. He followed this case until she died after years of serious memory problem. After she died in 1906, doctors recorded the dense deposits surrounding the nerve cells when they preformed a brain autopsy. He reported publicly at the same year she died. In the next five years, there were eleven similar cases reported. Some of them were already use the word "Alzheimer's Disease." The cause of Alzheimer's disease is poorly understood. Scientists and doctors believe this disease is caused by a combination of genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors. Although the causes of Alzheimer's are not complete, its effect on people is clear. This disease is usually in those over the age of 65. Also, a person has close relationship with the person who has Alzheimer's, such as mother, father or sister, has increased possibility of getting this disease. The scientist also consider the level of education is one of the factors. This disease passes by gene. .
             The early symptom of AD, which is in a small percentage, difficulties with language, executive functions, perception (agnosia), or execution of movements (apraxia) are more prominent than memory problems. Distant memories (episodic memory), facts (semantic memory), and implicit memory (the memory of body on doing something that we always do, like dressing yourself) are affect less than the new things at the beginning.