Alzheimer’s Effects on Memory Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive degenerative and ultimately fatal brain disease, in which cell to cell connections in the brain are lost. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, and is generally diagnosed in patients over the age of 65. The most commonly recognized symptom of Alzheimer’s disease is an inability to acquire new memories and difficulty in recalling recently observed facts, but it is by no means the only symptom. As the disease advances, symptoms include confusion, irritability and aggression, mood swings, language breakdown, long-term memory loss, and a gradual loss of bodily functions and death. Alzheimer’s does not affect all memory capacities equally: short-term memory (the ability to hold information in the mind in an active, readily-available state for a short period of time) is the first to go; next comes episodic memory (memory of autobiographical events); then the semantic memory …show more content…
As the disease advances, parts of the memory which were previously intact also become impaired, and eventually all reasoning, attention, and language abilities are disrupted. Alzheimer’s patients tend to have a loss of knowledge of the specific characteristics of semantic categories. Initially, they lose the ability to distinguish fine categories, such as species of animals or types of objects but over time it extends to broader, more general categories. At first a patient may see a lab and say, “that is a dog”; later, they may say, “that is an animal”. Neurologically, Alzheimer’s (and dementia in general) is characterized by a loss of neurons and synapses in the cerebral cortex and certain subcortical regions of the brain. This loss results in gross atrophy of the affected regions, including degeneration in the hippocampus, temporal lobe and parietal lobe, as well as parts of the frontal cortex and cingulate gyrus. In closing,