Alzheimer’s Disease is a Progressive Disease
Alzheimer’s Disease is a Progressive Disease
One thing is certain… every day we get a little bit older. With age comes wisdom, a growing family, and a chance to experience life in a different way, but what if recognizing family or enjoying the changes associated with growing older was unfeasible? What if that new experience was filled with the struggle of losing memories that filled one’s life before, or not being able to remember how to complete simple everyday tasks and make decisions? These are the effects Alzheimer’s Disease can have on an individual. This disease not only steals the memories of the past and of loved ones, but also one’s personal abilities such as adequately caring for themselves. According to Martone, Robert L., Piotrowski, and Nancy A., PhD (2017) Alzheimer’s Disease is “a progressive disease resulting in the loss of higher cognitive function; [it is] the most common form of dementia.” Someone with Alzheimer’s loses memories formed most recently in the working memory, but would be more likely to remember things from long ago. In the same article Martone (2017) says this about Alzheimer’s, “Alzheimer’s disease is now recognized as the most common form of dementia, composing sixty to eighty percent of all dementias across different age groups. In the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, 5.5 million people had the disease by early 2017. Of those afflicted with the disease, around 5.3 million were sixty-five and older while about two hundred thousand were under the age of sixty-five.” From this data, one is able to gain a perspective of just how many people suffer from this awful disease and is able to abolish the stigma of only elderly people getting Alzheimer’s as invalid.Alzheimer’s Disease is a Progressive Disease
Many times researching Alzheimer’s can be difficult concerning the differences and unique challenges each person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s faces. Another difficulty is in ethics. In the journal by Jacobo Mintzer (2018), he identifies the difficulty of obtaining consent to do research on someone with Alzheimer’s since the disease directly affects the brain’s decision making abilities. Another flaw in Alzheimer’s research is that there is no sure cause or treatment of the disease, so when research is done there is no guarantee of an advancement. Mintzer (2018) gives a brief report of a publication by Dr. Klunk describing an advancement researchers have made in identifying a cause and possible treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. He writes that for the longest time a presence of amyloid plaque in the brain was a sure diagnosis that someone would develop Alzheimer’s. Once they found a non-invasive technique of looking for amyloid in the brain, researchers were able to identify patients who were “normal”, but were experiencing symptoms of this disease. Later, many drug companies started to perform research with monoclonal antibodies, which were said to remove this plaque from the brain. However, yet again, research development faces the problem of obtaining test subjects. If a study is done and a number of people qualify to be given this treatment for having amyloid plaque on the brain, there is no guarantee any of the participants would have obtained the disease without any treatment.
Mintzer (2018) then gives an example of a sixty-six year old woman who is very active and at the height of her career. She has a family history of dementia, so she decides to go for genetic testing. The tests shown that she was at risk for developing Alzheimer’s since she had one of the genes that researchers think may lead to the development of Alzheimer’s and also is positive for having amyloid plaque on her brain. Although she is at higher risk, if she chooses to be treated for the disease she will spend thousands of dollars a year on treatment and there is no way to be certain she will obtain the disease. Even if she did begin to experience symptoms of Alzheimer’s, there would be no way of telling whether the treatment prompted the symptoms or not. As one may be able to conclude there are many variables that go into the research of Alzheimer’s disease, and there is still a long way to go in developing research to understand it.
