by Mobin Skaria

Created on: August 07, 2008   Last Updated: March 25, 2009

Alzheimer's Disease An Informative Report Alzheimer's is the most common type of dementia, if referred to statistics 60-80% (Lewis, Heitkemper, Dirksen, 2004) and roughly 5.2 million people in the United States has it while around 25 million worldwide. According to "www.alz.org" it is the sixth most leading cause of death.

This syndrome generally, but not only, affects people who are elderly (60+). Alzheimer's is a gradual process, and it can be made easier on the person by giving treatment, though there is no known current cure.

This syndrome is named after a German psychiatrist named Alois Alzheimer. Alzheimer also made studies of dead people. He first started to study this disease when he saw a 51 year old woman named Auguste. Auguste showed many of the symptoms of Alzheimer's (which then was unknown) which Alzheimer obsessively studied over the five years of the rest of her life. He then studied the brain of Auguste after she died to conclude that the disease blocked of neurons of the brain to communicate with each other. Alzheimer made his findings published to the world in 1906. Circa 1910, his findings were used to diagnose people all over the world.

Because Alzheimer's is a type of dementia, knowing what dementia is helps us understand the disease better. Dementia is a long-term and/or gradual syndrome that affects the brain and thus making the person lose consistency in many of their every day activity like speaking and logical mathematics and eventually prove that the person is not capable of taking care of him or herself. Alzheimer's currently doesn't have a proven cause, although scientists have thought that it might be due to "Genetic Influences, Defective Proteins, Biochemical Imbalances (South Deerfield, Mass, 1985)," or maybe even a Virus that is slowly affecting the brain. Even though the exact cause is not known, many believe that maintaining a healthy lifestyle by keeping fit, mentally and physically, is an important factor to avoid this disease. Building up immunity by eating different kinds of food is a suggested way to stay healthy during the disease.

Dementia is commonly found in patients who have bad nutrition, a disease in organs like the heart or the lung, and metabolic or hormone disorders. Women tend to have this disease more often, as they live longer than men. Also, many women at old age live widowed, as compared to men who remarry more usually. Since humans are social creatures, this could be another reason why women develop it more

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