The Three Stages Of Alzheimer's Disease

878 Words4 Pages
Alzheimer disease is a disease that causes degeneration in the cells of the brain. This causes irreversible destruction to memory and thinking skills. There are three stages of the disease. The stages are early-stage, moderate stage, and severe stage. People who are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s on average live up to eight years after being diagnosed. Some people can live longer than that depending on the factors of their specific case of Alzheimer’s disease. The Alzheimer’s Disease Education and Referral Center states that most people who have Alzheimer’s disease started noticing signs in their mid-sixties. The early-stage of the disease is very hard to diagnose since the individual can still function independently. The early-stage is when someone…show more content…
The patient’s symptoms include memory loss, language problems, and unpredictable behaviors. After her death, the doctor examined her brain and noticed abnormal clumps within her brain. Today these clumps, he had found, are called amyloid plaques. These tangles, which is another word for amyloid plaques, are found to be the main problem of Alzheimer’s disease. The tangles attack neurons, which causes them to die off. Once a neuron dies off there is no way of getting that connection back to a healthy neuron. Another reason why we lose our memory when we get Alzheimer’s disease is because we lose connections between the nerve cells and our brain. Signals that form memories and thoughts move through an individual nerve cell as a tiny electrical charge. Nerve cells connect to one another at synapses. When a charge reaches a synapse, it may trigger release of tiny bursts of chemicals called neurotransmitters. The neurotransmitters travel across the synapse, carrying signals to other cells. Alzheimer's disease disrupts both the way electrical charges travel within cells and the activity of neurotransmitters. (Alzheimer’s Association) Alzheimer’s disease leads to nerve cell death, and tissue loss. It is said that Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. People often get the two mixed up. Alzheimer’s differs from dementia although it is the most common. Dementia is a wide variety of symptoms related to memory loss, as where Alzheimer’s you can see the brain shrink as it progress which is the reasoning behind the symptoms. The only way to see if a person truly has Alzheimer’s disease is to perform an autopsy to diagnose

More about The Three Stages Of Alzheimer's Disease

Open Document