Читать книгу The Small Guide to Alzheimer's Disease - Gary Small - Страница 8

In 1906, Alois Alzheimer presented to the medical community the first case of what eventually became a disease named after him. He described a woman whose symptoms of confusion began at age 51. In addition to her memory loss, she developed a paranoid psychosis, and her mental clarity rapidly declined until she died at age 55.

When Professor Alzheimer performed an autopsy on her brain, he applied special dyes to the tissue before viewing it under the microscope. He was then able to see, for the first time, the presence of amyloid plaques and tau tangles—abnormal, insoluble protein deposits that had accumulated in brain areas that control memory and thinking.

The medical community found Alzheimer’s presentation interesting, but they didn’t pay too much attention to his findings. This was probably because it was assumed that Alzheimer’s disease was a rare neurodegenerative disorder that only afflicted a few people during middle age. It was thus classified as pre-senile dementia.

Attitudes and attention to the disease changed, however, in 1968, when a group of pathologists published a paper describing autopsy results of a series of older adults who had suffered from senility prior to death. The investigators used the same special dyes that Dr. Alzheimer had applied to the brain tissue of the patient he had presented 60 years earlier. This new study revealed the presence of the same amyloid plaques and tau tangles that were observed in Alzheimer’s original pre-senile case. Doctors subsequently talked about early-onset (before age 65) and late-onset (beginning after age 65) Alzheimer’s disease rather than pre-senile dementia and senility.

Prior to this new publication, doctors thought that senility was a normal part of aging. If Mom or Grandpa became confused and disoriented, the family would assume that it was just a normal part of old age and there was nothing to be done. The discovery that old-age cognitive symptoms could actually be due to an underlying disease was a wake-up call for researchers. When the scientific world learned of this discovery, doctors and scientists began taking Alzheimer’s disease more seriously because it was likely afflicting millions of older adults. This revelation also elicited tremendous fear among the general public who found out about the new epidemic of Alzheimer’s disease in older adults.

Regardless of the age at onset, Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by a gradual progression of symptoms and the accumulation of amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain’s frontal (under the forehead), temporal (beneath the temples), and other regions that control thinking and memory. It is the most common type of severe cognitive loss, or dementia, that disrupts patients’ ability to care for themselves.

Common Psychological Reactions to Age-Related Memory Loss

 Fear: “I’m losing my mind—I’m going to end up in a nursing home.”

 Denial: “All my friends are forgetful at my age—there’s nothing wrong with me.”

 Anger: “I get so mad when I can’t find the right word.”

 Self-pity: “Why me? I’m too young to have these problems.”

 Guilt: “I should have taken better care of myself.”

 Depression: “I’m nothing without my memory—why should I bother going on like this?”