Alzheimer s Disease And The Aging Population - 1818 Words

â€Å"Memories are a way of holding onto the things we are; the things we love; the things we never want to lose.† ~Kevin Arnold Alzheimer’s, a severe irreversible form of dementia, is now a very prevalent issue in the aging population. Scientists are just beginning to understand what Alzheimer’s is, what causes Alzheimer’s and how to prevent it. Although research has come a long way, â€Å"Alzheimer’s disease, as science tries to grasp it, seems to slip through our fingers. The complex interaction of neurochemistry, genetics, environment, lifestyle and personality all play a part in how individuals experience Alzheimer’s. ~ Harry Clayton Memories are the things we uphold. Whether bad or good these memories are engraved in us and can’t be stolen†¦show more content†¦He devised a study on mental patients, after that he hypothesized dementia was caused by body â€Å"humours†. This is basically an earlier way of stating the contemporary view that dementia is mental instability that arises from disturbances in neurotransmitters. Not many more discoveries were made until Alois Alzheimer, a German neurologist, who formally discovered Alzheimer’s as a total separated form of dementia. In 1905 while staring through the barrel of a microscope at the paper thin slices of deceased Alzheimer’s patient (although Alzheimer’s was not yet referred to at that time) Auguste Deter’s brain, Alzheimer noticed the microscopic plaques and tangles riddled through the tissue. Combined with his research on Auguste Deter’s behaviour while she was alive Alzheimer finally had all he needed to publish his research and bring the disease he coined as Alzheimer’s Disease to light. Alzheimer discussed his findings on the brain pathology and symptoms of prehensile dementia publicly on 3 November 1906, at the Tà ¼bingen meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatrists. The attendees at this lecture seemed uninterested in what he had to say. Following the lecture, Alzheimer published a short paper su mmarizing his lecture; in 1907 he wrote a larger paper detailing the disease and his findings. The disease would not become known as Alzheimer s disease until 1910, when Kraepelin named it so in the chapter on Prehensile and Senile Dementia in the 8th edition of his