Alzheimer's Disease

  What is Alzheimer's disease?  Alzheimer's is a slow fatal disease of the brain affecting one in 10 people over the age of 65.  No one is immune.  The disease comes on gradually as abnormal protein fragments called plaques and tangles accumulate in the brain and kill brain cells.  They start here in the hippocampus the part of the brain where memories are the first to form.  Over many years' time, the plaques and tangles slowly destroy the hippocampus and it becomes harder and harder to form new memories.  Simple recollections from a few hours or days ago but the rest of us might take for granted are just not there.  After that more plaques and tangles spread into different regions of the brain.  Ellen cells and compromising function wherever they go this is spreading around is what causes the different stages of Alzheimer's.  From the hippocampus, the disease spreads here to the region of the brain where the language is processed when...

 Vitamin E was proposed as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease many years ago. However, the effectiveness of the drug is not clear. Vitamin E is an antioxidant and neuroprotector and it has anti-inflammatory and hypocholesterolemic properties, driving to its importance for brain health. Moreover, the levels of vitamin E in Alzheimer’s disease patients are lower than in non-demented controls. Thus, vitamin E could be a good candidate to have beneficial effects against Alzheimer’s. However, evidence is consistent with a limited effectiveness of vitamin E in slowing progression of dementia; the information is mixed and inconclusive. The question is why does vitamin E fail to treat Alzheimer’s disease? In this paper we review the studies with and without positive results in Alzheimer’s disease and we discuss the reasons why vitamin E as treatment sometimes has positive results on cognition.

Though the effects of the disease are similar, there are two main types. Early-onset Alzheimer's. This type happens to people who are younger than age 65. Often, they're in their 40s or 50s when they're diagnosed with the disease. When it affects older adults, though most develop normal functioning by themselves and don't require medication, some patients may have a high rate of memory loss after long-term treatment—the researchers estimate that one out of 10 can experience an average dropout for four years while developing dementia. People usually first notice symptoms during middle adulthood; once those begin occurring, more frequent diagnosis is needed so doctors know which stages overlap each other. "If you take care," says Dr. Roberts at NYU Langone Medical Center on Long Island recently before talking about his study, "his brain gets less responsive through aging." And he believes this should be prevented. This type happens to people who are yo...

 It has become known as the "second oldest progressive condition" after Parkinsonism where there have been almost 200000 cases reported since 1950. - The first case was described in 1943 but later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which eventually led to the neurodegenerative disease of central nervous system and caused many deaths by 1970. Image source: wikipedia When Alzheimer's Disease is seen on a genetic level it turns out that around 90% – probably more than 95%- comes from one specific gene (called apolipoprotein E receptor γ) although both ApoE and AD risk factors are present across different genes for some people so having two or three copies of an allele may not help very much if you suffer from only sporadic symptoms rather then severe chronic depression.    A diagnosis of schizophrenia is not a simple one but requires an individual to develop and express aspects that are characteristic for each patient.