In Alzheimer’s, the brain and nerves get sick. It’s hard to think and remember things when brain cells die. At first, this sickness isn’t bad, but it gets worse over time. A lot of people have this kind of dementia. Even though people with Alzheimer’s can’t get better, they can get help that lessens the effects of the disease.
What Is Alzheimer’s Disease?
It can be scary, strange, and hard to deal with Alzheimer’s. We still don’t know a lot about the illness that more than 5 million people in the US have. You can remember things even if you forgot to buy something on your list. A lot of people forget things, and it gets worse with age.
Memory problems, which are a sign of Alzheimer’s, happen more often and make daily life less safe or useful. People with Alzheimer’s often forget to do things like turn off the cooker, put on the right clothes or remember important meetings.
Other than that, the disease often makes it harder to do normal things like budgeting, planning, following steps that have more than one part, and making plans. It may additionally alter your mood, make you angry, keep you from going to social events, and leave you feeling lost. It’s so bad that it can change the way someone walks or make them walk more slowly.
How Is Alzheimer’s Diagnosed?
Alzheimer’s is usually found following a series of tests, such as ones that check for memory loss and ones that test how well someone can think. Their health will also be checked to see if the memory and thinking problems are caused by something else, like a different type of dementia, a physical illness, or the side effects of a drug. In addition to brain scans and spine taps, people may also get a protein called amyloid, known as a sign of Alzheimer’s, to see if it builds up in the brain.
What Causes Alzheimer’s?
Changes in genes that happen very rarely cause less than 5% of cases. These conditions often start when people are young and become worse around middle age. The chance of getting Alzheimer’s goes up with age, and most people don’t get it until they are 65.
Alzheimer’s is more likely to happen to people who have certain health problems. Age, on the other hand, is the most important risk factor. If you have diabetes, high blood pressure, or a stroke, you may be more likely to get Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia. Also, being depressed is linked to a higher chance.
Two to four times as many people who have the ApoE4 gene variant will get Alzheimer’s as people who don’t have it. Suppose someone has two copies of the ApoE4 gene variant; about ten times as many people will get Alzheimer’s. This is more likely to hurt women than men. Also, people who carry ApoE4 are more likely to get sick before their friends and family. About 3% of people have two copies of ApoE4, while 25% only have one.
Is There A Way To Avoid Alzheimer’s?
There are still some things that people don’t understand about this answer. Being active, eating well, making friends, and learning new things all keep us healthy and busy. They may also help delay dementia for a while.
Most likely, this is because they work well with your mind, body, and emotions. It takes more time and effort to learn new things and use our brains more. This means we have more neurons, which can help with memory and thinking problems for a short time. There’s no brain game, magic pill, or boost.
What Happens Before Alzheimer’s?
Not everyone with Alzheimer’s slowly loses their mind before they show any signs of the disease. One type of MCI can change memory. One more type changes what people think or choose to do. Both types of people lose some of these skills, but that doesn’t mean they can’t live on their own.
People with MCI are more likely to get Alzheimer’s, but it doesn’t always happen. On the surface, memory loss has only been noticed by experts in the last few years. This may happen before dementia or even be a sign of it. This happens when one person can’t remember things or has scary thoughts that no one else has.
Dementia researchers have found that people can notice these problems before they get so bad that a doctor can tell they have dementia. These people may have a higher chance of getting Alzheimer’s in the future because of this. Alzheimer’s has three main stages: mild, moderate, and severe. It’s not always easy to tell when and how someone will get worse. Stages that are mild to very mild can last for years.
Are There Any Medicines For Alzheimer’s?
The brands Aricept, Exelon, Namenda, Namzaric, and Razadyne are the ones they can use to sell five drugs. These medicines make it take longer for acetylcholine to break down because the brain doesn’t make enough of it. But none of them have been proven to last or work well for a long time. Over the years, many people have tried and failed to find better drugs.
The drugs might not have worked because they were given to people who were already very sick. It’s possible that their brains were too damaged for the drugs to work anymore. Many of the medicines created so far are aimed at the amyloid protein that builds up in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains and causes memory loss. This is done because many doctors think that the buildup of amyloid is what makes Alzheimer’s happen.
A new study shows that amyloid builds up at least twenty years before the first signs of dementia appear. People in the early stages of dementia can be found, even if they don’t show any signs yet, thanks to better scans that can find amyloid. At this early stage, there are a number of clinical studies going on, including large trials that are testing drugs that fight amyloid.
