Cognitive Symptoms Of Alzheimer's Disease

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As Kevin Arnold once said, “Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, and the things you never want to lose.” However, not being able to remember the things that one loves, one’s self, and the things one never wants to lose is just another ordinary day for an individual battling Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s is an incurable disease that is characterized by the impairment of memory loss and loss of intellectual and social skills.
Every sixty seven seconds someone develops Alzheimer’s disease, making it the sixth leading cause of death in the United States (alz.org). Of the estimated 5.3 million with Alzheimer’s, roughly 5.1 million are ages sixty five and older, with women making up almost two-thirds (Carter, …show more content…
Amnesia, being the most common symptom found in individuals with Alzheimer’s, is defined as the loss of memory or the inability to remember imperative events that occurred in one’s lifetime. Aphasia is known as the loss or impairment of the ability to produce or comprehend language and includes the inability to read, write, speak, form words, and name objects (Keady, 2011). Apraxia refers to the incapability of performing daily lifestyle activities, such as dressing oneself, and agnosia deals with individual’s not being able to recognize familiar places and faces. These four cognitive symptoms are the prevalence of the impairment impacting an Alzheimer individual’s everyday life. Furthermore, behavioral and affective symptoms are linked together in patients with Alzheimer’s and are referred to as neuropsychiatric symptoms. Neuropsychiatric symptoms are very common in Alzheimer’s disease, particularly agitation, apathy, depression, and delusions (Rosenberg, 2015). These symptoms are commonly associated with a more sudden progression to detrimental dementia. Additionally, multiple neuropsychiatric challenges an individual will face are loss of directional map and damage to communication centers, including not being able to properly follow a train of thought and the misunderstanding of words spoken by …show more content…
Numerous brain scans, like MRI’s or CAT scans, are performed in order to more accurately diagnose an individual through the understanding of which specific areas of the brain are shrinking. There are a large variety of dementia related diseases that must be ruled out before making a formal diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, such as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), Parkinson’s disease, and Vascular Dementia. MCI is a deficiency with cognitive brain processing that is rare for the individual’s age, but does not interfere with daily activities. Alzheimer’s involves the impairment of multiple areas of the brain, is extremely common within the normal age range, and highly interferes with daily activities, easily ruling out MCI as a possible diagnosis of an individual experiencing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s are both widely known for developing later on in life, which causes people to assume that they are linked together. Even though Parkinson’s eventually results in memory loss or a form of dementia, it is primarily a movement disorder (alz.org). Where in comparison, Alzheimer’s is primarily a memory impairment that rarely includes a movement disorder. Vascular Dementia, the second most common form of dementia following Alzheimer’s, involves multiple cognitive deficiencies within a few months succeeding a stroke, whereas
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