Banning Alzheimer's Disease Research Paper

Banning 1 Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease and the most common cause of dementia. Alzheimer’s afflicts about four million Americans and is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Furthermore it is the leading cause of mental impairment in elderly people and the reason for a high percentage of admissions in nursing homes, assisted living homes, and other long term elderly care facilities. Most patients found with this disease are affected by hallucinations and delusions. Today, as research on Alzheimer’s disease progresses, scientists are describing other chemical changes associated with the disease. These include nerve cell degeneration in the brain’s nucleus and reduced levels of the brains neurotransmitter
Individuals in this stage will most have more trouble recognizing where they are, who they are with, and the date and day of the week. Poor judgment is also a noticeable trait at this state and the individual’s personality will change in most cases. In the final stage of dementia, there are profound losses of memory and mental abilities. Eventually, individuals will become bedridden as brain functions disintegrate (Ramanathan 286). Patients will often not recognize their spouse of children or be able to read with comprehension. Primary undifferentiated dementia diseases produce the dementia by direct effects on the brain, such as those seen in Alzheimer’s; they resemble each other and often can’t be distinguished from one another through regular diagnostic means. Therefore, one can see how the three types can cause diagnosis problems for people in the medical field (Heston 36). The primary differentiated dementia diseases often include losses of muscle control and thus they can be separated from the previous group. The secondary dementia diseases are not due to a permanent impairment of the brain and can often be cured, so accurate diagnosis is
Dr.Gelb puts forth four areas that could be helpful in the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. These are cognitive testing, global assessment, functional assessment, and behavioral rating scales. Banning 3 Cognitive testing, while not directly related to everyday tasks, can be helpful in rating the change in the patient over time. Dr.Gelb discusses at length how copying geometric puzzles and counting backwards by seven doesn’t reflect everyday skills. His main point about this kind of testing is the rate of change seen between tests. This rate of change can help doctors diagnose the dementia and classify it into its proper category, one of those being dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (Gelb). Research is being conducted in the area of Alzheimer’s itself and the disease’s progression. One set of researchers has found that Alzheimer’s patients, while being aware of their deficits in memory and other function in the beginning of the illness, lose some of this self-awareness as the disease progresses. This self-awareness is most likely, logically, connected to the fact that an Alzheimer’s memory deteriorates as the disease progresses, a patient cannot be aware of things they cannot remember (Derouesne