{"id":19391,"date":"2024-02-23T14:22:30","date_gmt":"2024-02-23T07:22:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abdiwaluyo.com\/?p=19391"},"modified":"2025-02-25T11:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T04:24:11","slug":"what-you-need-to-know-about-alzheimers-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abdiwaluyo.com\/en\/health-info\/what-you-need-to-know-about-alzheimers-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"What You Need to Know About Alzheimer’s Disease?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By:\u00a0 Thalia Kaylyn Averil<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause and the most common type of dementia in older adults. In the late stages, Alzheimer’s disease can cause patients to progressively lose cognitive abilities such as memory, judgment, personality, visuospatial orientation, and language. Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease often experience severe disability, muteness, and immobility over a period of five to ten years.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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This disease has been associated with a number of risk factors, with the biggest risk factor being age. Alzheimer’s disease usually does not show symptoms until the patient has reached the age of 50. The chance of developing this disease increases drastically with age; the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease doubles every five years, starting from 1% in the 60\u201364 year age group and increasing to 40% or higher in the 85\u201389 year age group. However, early dementia can occur if a person has trisomy 21, one of the causes of Down syndrome. In addition, other risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease include traumatic brain injury, depression, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, smoking habits, family history of dementia, elevated homocysteine levels, and the presence of the APOE e4 allele.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 1. Image of a normal brain (left) and the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient (right).<\/p><\/div>\n

The pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease are amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, both of which are primarily seen in the late stages of the disease. Amyloid plaques are a buildup of beta-amyloid peptide (A\u03b2) in the gray matter of the brain, while neurofibrillary tangles are accumulations of tau protein that normally occur within nerve cells. Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the death of neurons and usually starts in one region of the brain, namely the entorhinal cortex.<\/span><\/p>\n