Alzheimer’s Disease.
There are many questions that families abroad have unanswered about their loved ones. Millions have died from this, and millions more have been robbed of those they hold dear. Even in my own family, this disease has taken away my grandfather and several great aunts. I will be researching Alzheimer’s disease to find out the answers to these questions:
1.What is the history behind Alzheimer’s disease?
2.What causes Alzheimer’s disease?
3.What are the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on the human body?
4.What are the effects of Alzheimer’s on the family?
5.What are we doing about it?
These are just a few questions that are also being asked worldwide. I hope my research will answer any questions that I, or others like myself have been asking for a long time.
So, what is the history behind Alzheimer’s disease? In 1901, there was a 51-year-old woman named Auguste D. She was admitted to the state asylum in Frankfurt, Germany and was suffering from cognitive and language deficits, auditory hallucinations, delusions, paranoia and aggressive behavior. She was then studied there by Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915). Alzheimer moved to the Munich medical school in 1903 to work with Emil Kraepelin, (one of the foremost German psychiatrists of that era) and when Auguste D died in April of 1906, her brain was then sent to him for examination. In November of that year, Alzheimer presented Auguste's case at a psychiatry meeting, and he published his work later in 1907. In 1910, Kraepelin adopted the term Alzheimer's Disease. We still refer to this term often when speaking of even the most common forms of senile dementia and memory loss (Wellcome Trust).
Now this may be the first use of the term Alzheimer’s disease, but the sickness goes back hundreds of years under the name senile dementia. During the eighteenth century, the term dementia had both a clinical and a legal usage. It often referred to states of mental degradation and...