Dementia And Alzheimer's Disease

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Dementia and Alzheimer disease Mearon Azmera Tompkins Cortland Community College Abstract This paper investigates the phenomenon of Alzheimer’s disease one of the most dreadful disease which is affecting from the adulthood up to aged people on nervous systems present in brain. Major symptoms and associated symptoms with the diseases, theories of the development of the Alzheimer disease and different causes of the disease, factors that contribute to the development of the diseases, distribution of Alzheimer’s disease among developing and developed countries, and diagnosis and current treatment of the disease have been explained neatly and legibly with proper diagrams and easy to understand. The study by Maria shiver on women and Alzheimer’s…show more content…
In the usual case, the Alzheimer’s dementia syndrome is characterized by early episodic memory decline (eg amnesia) consistent with early neuropathology targeting the medial temporal lobes, with additional deficits in language and semantic knowledge, abstract reasoning, executive functions,attention,and visuospatial abilities that contribute to decline in everyday functions(Salmon and Bondi,2009).A number of performance characteristics on episodic memory measures help differentiate between mildly demented Alzheimer patients and normal older adults. These characteristics include an abnormally high rate of forgetting whereby patients with an early Alzheimer’s disease are particularly impaired on measures of delayed recall; failure to benefit from recognition testing, in which retrieval demands are reduced, indicating storage loss of memory for recently learned information rather than a retrieval deficit; and an abnormal serial position effect characterized by an attenuation of the primary effect(i.e. recall of words from the beginning of a…show more content…
The apolipoprotien gene controls a protein produced in the liver and the brain. The protein helps carry blood cholesterol and performs other functions. It is found in neurons and glial cells in healthy nerve cells. The APOE gene has three different forms known as alleles: E2, E3, and E4.The APOE genes occur in pairs like all other genes, and people may have one, two, or none of these. The E2 form seems to decrease the risk of Alzheimer disease, E4 increases the risk. The presence of an E4 gene only means that the risk of Alzheimer disease is increased. It doesn’t predict the disease in a person who doesn’t have any symptoms of Alzheimer disease, and that as many as 50 percent of people with two E4 genes will not develop the disease. The association of E4 and Alzheimer disease is weak in very old people, where the risk of Alzheimer disease is very high because of advanced age. Some research suggest that most people with one E3 gene and E4 gene will not get the disease Other researchers Shiver(2011) suggested that Alzheimer disease is not considered as a genetic disease because no single gene determines if an individual will develop the illness. However, genetics undoubtedly play a role in the disease because having a first degree relative with Alzheimer’s increase the risk of getting the

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