Alzheimer's DiseaseIntroduction to Alzheimer'sAlzheimer's disease is a progressive degenerative disease of the brain. It was first described by the German neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) in 1905. This disease worsens with advancing age, although there is no evidence that it is caused by the aging process. The average life expectancy of a sick person is between five and ten years, but some patients today can live up to 15 years thanks to improvements in medical care and treatments. The cause of Alzheimer's has not yet been discovered, and it is not possible to confirm that a person has Alzheimer's until an autopsy following death. How Alzheimer's developsWhat causes Alzheimer's? Well, no one knows exactly how this debilitating disease develops. But recent advances have yielded several clues as to how it came to be. Initially, when we study the brain of a victim of Alzheimer's disease, we focus on two specific areas. One is the cortex of the frontal and cerebral lobes1. The second is the hippocampus (which in Greek means seahorse which it resembles2), which is located under the cerebral cortex and is responsible for short-term memory. If we studied samples from these two sections, we would find three irregularities that are not found in normal brain matter. These three are called neurofibrillary tangles, neuritic sores, and granulovacuolar generation.3. Numerous axons and dendrites emerge from a nerve cell. Aneurofibrillary tangle occurs when the neuron changes. A number of dendrites are missing, and the nucleus is filled with steel wool-like protein filaments. Although all older people have some of these helix-shaped bundles in their brains as they are normal indicators of aging, Alzheimer's patients have more of them than usual. Their presence usually in the frontal and temporal lobes is an indication of AD. Senile neuritic sores are small round objects. They are masses of amyloid protein material composed of debris left over from healthy nerve endings that have been broken and decayed. Their presence near the cell further indicates that something has gone wrong. Neuritic plaques are the best diagnostic test for determining AD. A third sign of neuronal deterioration is granulovacuolar degeneration. This happens when fluid-filled vacuoles are seen crowding inside the nerve cell, particularly in the triangular-shaped cells of the hippocampus. This condition can only be observed in carefully cut, stained, and analyzed brain tissue. The cell, having lost all its dendrites and nucleus, soon disintegrates completely, vanishing into the body's waste disposal system. As enough nervous material is depleted, the brain actually shrinks, sometimes by as much as 10%5. The more cells the AD patient loses, the greater his mental functions