Alzheimer is known as the most common degenerative brain disease. According to this video, today more than 5 million of Americans have this disease. Researchers predict that by 2050 will be three times as many cases of alzheimer. On the other hand, frontotemporal dementia is a progressive disease that affect parts of the brain …show more content…
It is normal for seniors to forget certain things which is due to the aging process. Meanwhile, three to four percent of seniors start experiencing dementia when they are 70 years old, twenty percent of seniors at the age of 80 start experiencing dementia and fifty percent of seniors start experiencing dementia at the age of 90. For this reason, dementia is considered as serious progressive disease. Mr. Kandel stated that the dementia that is more common is the alzheimer disease. In 1906 Alois Alzheimer described a case that was different from any other case that he had ever seen before. A woman who was 51 years old came to see him to find out what she had. The woman had memory loss problems and she also had irrational thoughts. She thought in an irrational way that her husband was complicated and she was also getting jealous of the activities he used to do. After time passed, she started thinking that people were trying to get her, her memory was deteriorating even more, and it became more difficult for her to find her way back home. After all the symptoms that she was experiencing she was hospitalized and after five years of been hospitalized she died. Alois Alzheimer did the autopsy to this woman and he found the three characteristics of alzheimer disease. He noticed a shrink in her brain particular in the cerebral cortex, plaques were outside the neural cells and also there was tangle …show more content…
Holtzman explained the differences between dementia and alzheimer. According to Holtzman, dementia is a loss of memory and cognitive abilities that impair the individual’s functioning. Alzheimer disease is one of the several disorders that cause dementia. There are others common causes of alzheimer such as stroke, parkinson and frontotemporal dementia. Mr. Holtzman stated that it is common that when people start getting older they might have little troubles with memory such as forgetting names and become a little bit slow in their thinking. However, what it is not normal is when a senior start repeating himself or herself, start forgetting conversations and have trouble with their checkbooks something that they did not experience before. Those are clear signs that something is wrong and that those are not signs of normal