Alzheimer's Disease: A Slow Death of the Mind
This report is a study on the effects of senile dementia, also known as Alzheimer's disease, often abbreviated SDAT for Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer Type. Once divided into two different diagnoses, today Alzheimer's disease and senile dementia are regarded as one disease (Heston and White, 1983, p. 15). While there is much information today on the scientific and medical aspects of Alzheimer's disease, information about how it affects not only the victim, but also others concerned is just now beginning to become available.
Alzheimer's, the "slow death of the mind," is one of the cruelest diseases because it kills its victims twice. First, the mind dies, taking with it the personality and all that was the person. Then the body dies after a long degenerative process robs it of the ability to walk, talk or control elemental functions.
Families are torn apart physically, emotionally and financially as they struggle to cope with watching a beloved, once dynamic and integral member of their family gradually forgetting dates and names and eventually failing to recognize even the closest members of his or her own family. At that stage, the patient must either be placed in a nursing home or be kept at home with the family, requiring nearly constant, 24-hour care.
A Brief History of Alzheimer's Disease
In 1906, a German neurologist named Alois Alzheimer encountered a woman with all the symptoms of severe dementia--memory loss, disorientation and hallucinations--even though she was only 51. Three years later, she was dead, and Alzheimer obtained her brain for examination. He "identified two primary neuropathological hallmarks of the disease: neurofibrillary tangles (NFT), described as 'a tangled bundle of fibers "indicating" the site where once neurons had been located,' and structures that were later called plaques . . .(Cotman, Cummings, & Whitson, 1991, pp. 222-23)....