Understanding Alzheimer's Disease

What is Alzheimer 's Disease?

Alzheimer 's disease is a serious disease that affects more than five million Americans. This disease doesn 't just affect the person who has it, families are drastically affected too. In many cases, caregivers are needed to insure the person can be safe. Alzheimer 's disease comes with warning signs, and the warning signs that someone you know or love could have Alzheimer 's are, memory loss that disrupts daily life, challenges in planning or solving problems, difficulty completing familiar tasks at home, at work, or at leisure, confusion with time or place, trouble understanding visual image and spatial relationships, new problems with words in speaking or writing, misplacing things and losing the

Alzheimer 's is a disease that interferes with normal function of the brain related to memory and other important functions, and also deteriorates the brain. How exactly does the brain just deteriorate on itself? The answer to that question has to do with two things called plaques and tangles. Plaques are clumps of protein also referred as beta-amyloid that destroy brain cells in a couple different ways. One for examples is cell-to-cell communication, the process by sending and receiving signals between cells that initiate a certain reaction. To better understand this, imagine taking a glow stick and cracking it so the whole thing is glowing. The glow represents the healthy cells and their communication, but if part of the glow stick did not crack and did not start to glow, it would be just like how plaques affect cell-to-cell communication, by affecting a certain place needed in order for the wanted action to occur. Moving onto tangles, tangles are threads of tau protein in the brain that twist into abnormal tangles in brain cells. The reason why tangles are so important to brain function is because these tangles are used to transport needed nutrients to the brain, and if the threads are tangled and abnormal, the nutrients may not get to the needed spot, or the tangles may cause a complication in the

Alzheimer 's is a hard disease to deal with, and more often, caregivers are needed for patients with Alzheimer 's disease. As a caregiver, it will not be an easy thing to do. In fact, caregivers are often stressed and overwhelmed because of the frequent care the Alzheimer 's patients require. They require help with eating, bathing, dressing, taking prescribed medication, communicating, help going to the bathroom, and more. Patients with Alzheimer 's are not able to perform these daily tasks because they may forget how to do them. For example, if someone with Alzheimer 's needed to take a certain prescription at a certain time, they may forget, or if they do remember, they may not take the correct amount needed. This could become a very high risk for the patient dying due to an overdose. All the care required for Alzheimer 's patients puts a lot of added stress onto the caregiver. They can feel social withdrawal towards society, anxiety about what the next day brings, depression that changes your outlook, anger towards the patient and how they aren 't doing what they were able to do at one point of time, denial and thinking that it will get better, exhaustion about daily tasks, lack of concentration that makes performing familiar tasks difficult, and health problems that can affect your mental and physical health (alz.org). To the right is a picture showing the ages of people affected by Alzheimer 's. Based on this graph, the most affected age is