Alive, but without life
Alzheimer’s
The Silent Disease

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to describe Alzheimer’s disease and the affects it has on humans. Alzheimer’s is a sad deadly disease that aged people fear of having. Sadly more than half the population in humans 75 and old have it in one form or another. There are other types if memory disease, however, this paper is only going to cover Alzheimer’s disease. This disease is the fifth leading cause of death in elderly people. However, there is no cure and no ways on know exactly what causes Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that affects the behavior, thought process and the memory of older people. A German Doctor named DR. Alois Alzheimer, discovered Alzheimer’s by observing a patient and her reaction to certain things. This patient died after years of degenerating memory problems, confusion and difficulty understanding questions. After her death Dr. Alzheimer’s performed an autopsy, his finding were very inconclusive. He found dense deposits around the nerve cells he called this neuritic plaques. Inside the nerve cell, he discovered twisted bands of fibers called neurifibrillary tangles. Neuritic plaques are the pieces or protein and other matter that surround the neuron. The neurifibrillary tangles are protein build up inside the neuron. These two work together to disrupt the brain normal function and increases when someone has AD. Our brain have these two things in them to begin with, they just have more with AD. Sadly, Alzheimer’s disease is none to be the fifth leading cause of death in people 65 and older. After his discovery in 1906, of this usual disease Dr. Alzheimer’s studied AD until his death in 1915. He had no idea that this discovery would bear his name a few years after his death. At the time of his discovery, Dr. Alzheimer thought an organic matter caused the disorder. However, to this day the cause of AD is still unknown. Dr. Alzheimer died December 19, 1915 of tonsillitis, which resulted in him getting nephritis. While alive, he published multiply papers on dementia and the different kinds and there affects to the human brain. Since its discoverer y, there have been many breakthroughs, like the discovery of a link between cognitive decline and the number of plagues and tangles in the brain. In the 1960’s, when this discovery was made about the cognitive decline, the medical board recognized that is was not a normal part of aging and that something had to be done to cure it. Since then AD has have a large increase of attention into the nerve cells in the human brain. Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive disease that gets worse over time, until the person dies. In many cases, AD is actually the cause of death or the reaction to causing the person to get another illness.AD is a leading cause of pneumonia in people 85 and older, because they forget to keep themselves up (like taking their medications) and they sometime forget to swallow the mucus inside them causing pneumonia. As with the rest of our bodies our brain has to change to adapt to the changes we go through during life. AD leads to nerve cell and tissue loss threw out the whole brain. Over time, the brain of someone with AD shrinks causing it to loss normal functioning. In today’s research, there have been many discoveries of there being stages that come along with AD. Researchers have discovered there are ten stages of AD. Stage one being the stage where someone starts to have a greater amount of memory loss that may disrupt his or her daily lives. The most common side effect in the beginning is forgetting things they just learned. In the second stage, people start to have problems with problem solving and planning things. People with AD may start to notice the little things like not being able to follow a plan or even work out problems with numbers; there concentration seems to decrease in this stage. The third stage gets to