What Is Alzheimers

What Is Alzheimers - Alzheimer's is a degenerative brain disease characterized by progressive decline of cognitive functions and memory, in particular, that involves an increasing difficulty to perform common daily activities, up to the complete loss of personal autonomy.

Causes

The exact causes that trigger and sustain the degeneration are unknown despite the significant amount of studies made in over a century since its discovery.
Many of the hypotheses advanced (viral, toxic, autoimmune), in fact, have not yet been confirmed and only the idea of a possible genetic origin seems to resist.
At avvalorarla there are the trend of the disease to occur more easily in individuals of the same family and its association with specific genetic variants (of chromosomes 14, 19 and 21).
We know, however, that the symptoms are due to widespread destruction of neurons, caused mainly by the betamiloide, a protein that, settling between neurons, acts as a kind of glue, including plaques and tangles "tangles" and by a strong decrease of acetylcholine in the brain a neurotransmitter essential for communication between neurons, and thus for memory and other intellectual faculties.

What Is Alzheimers

Symptoms

Disease onset is usually insidious because early symptoms are subtle and difficult to distinguish from common distractions and troubles of a healthy person who is just getting old.
Memory problems, for example, are the most characteristic of Alzheimer's and often the first to appear, but within certain limits can be considered "normal" in the elderly or be caused by other types of problems more or less serious and curable with appropriate therapies.
However, since only a careful visit and any other exams can remove the doubt between normal and pathological aging and possibly exclude different problems from Alzheimer's disease, it is important to understand when you go to the doctor.
If you want to know in detail the early symptoms of Alzheimer's read this article.
According to the American Alzheimer's Association there are ten symptoms that pay attention:
forgetfulness and memory disorders, particularly for the most recent facts (phenomenon that physicians indicate the term of anterograde amnesia);
difficulty performing tasks known as tie their shoes or button that does not depend on physical disabilities (apraxia);
fix to recognize objects and their functions (agnosia);
fix to give a name to the common things that are recognized (anomia);
spatial disorientation (family sites are confused) and temporal (err the month, season or year);
loss of judgment and assessment of social and environmental context;
difficulty in performing logical operations or relatively simple mathematics (acalculia) which may involve for example the fact of having to count and recount the money; tendency to lose things continually dimenticandole in the strangest places (keys in the refrigerator, kitchen linen); -sudden changes of mood or personality; and, finally, loss of initiative and interest in oneself, others and the environment in General.

When you go to the doctor

Each of these symptoms taken alone does not necessarily indicate the existence of a dementia and the appearance should not therefore scare, but rather sound like an alarm bell so go to the doctor, especially if there are precedents in family of degenerative brain diseases or if we are not experiencing a moment of stress or tiredness are particularly frequent or disturbing, tend to persist or worsen to add that gradually appear.

Diagnosis

Even when you recognize the pathological character of some behaviors and get to a safe diagnosis is not easy even for the doctor.
First you have to exclude all other diseases that may have a similar symptomatology: the certainty of diagnosis of Alzheimer's can be had only by detecting typical signs of the disease, amyloid plaques and tangles, Hanks in brain tissue, and then only with biopsy or postmortem autopsy.
However, you can get to a diagnosis possible or likely even through the history of the patient and family, the analysis of symptoms and other laboratory and instrumental examinations: blood and cerebrospinal fluid to verify the possibility of anemias, biochemical or brain infections deficit; electroencephalogram; CT or MRI to observe possible anatomical alterations (cortical atrophy or expanded ventricles).
The hinge still remains and cognitive neuropsychological assessment through a series of tests aimed at assessing several functions: short-term memory (of numbers, words, phrases), long-term memory (voluntary and incidental), attentive, perceptive, and prassiche, and General cognitive functions. Among these one of the most well-known and used is the Mini Mental State Examination.
The presence of lag disorientation, memory deficit, acalculia, anomie or agnosia (particularly for animated objects) makes the clinical picture compatible with the diagnosis of Alzheimer-type dementia.

Course

Unfortunately at present there is no treatment that can stop and heal the brain degeneration of Alzheimer's dementia.
However the symptomatic treatment and care continues with a targeted rehabilitation it slows progression while maintaining a good quality of life for as long as possible especially if implemented early to appearances of the first symptoms.
The course is slowly progressing to a stage where the seriousness of the insane framework increases the chances of contracting other organic diseases and reduces considerably the life expectancy, about 5-10 years after the onset of the disease.

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