What is Alzheimers

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[edit] What is Alzheimers disease

Alzheimers (correct medical spelling: "Alzheimer's disease", but the public calls it "Alzheimers") is a progressive loss of cognitive functioning over a long period of time due to senile plaques (shown here as red color in brain tissue of mice)have been and still are the subject of very interesting research. Hopefully this will at some point in the future lead to new therapeutic approaches. The link above shows experiments on mice where one group served as a non treated control while the treatment group had been treated for seven days with the antioxidant spice Curcumin. Only one week of treatment reduced the amount of the plaques deposited on micro nutritional vessels that supply the brain cells with nutrients (Ref.16).

At the present time we are extremely limited with regard to any effective therapy that would halt the process of this type of dementia. The common form of Alzheimers starts beyond the age of 60 years, only about 5% start before that. The majority of these early start cases are due to one or more inherited genetic mutations at the chromosomes 1, 14, 19 or 21.

In the older Alzheimers patients only up to 20% seem to be inherited, the rest are called "sporadic" cases, which may have some genetic predisposition, but likely are somehow triggered by the environment in ways that are not yet fully determined. The patient loses more and more of the cognitive functions over the years until the patient usually has to be admitted to one of the care homes that specialize in the care of the wandering and eventually completely incapacitated Alzheimer patient.

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Alzheimers, dementia and delirium

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