Alzhemer's: The Slow and Deady Silent Assassin

Alzheimer’s disease is a slow and deadly silent assassin. You can have it in you your whole life, but not be hit by hit until you reach an average age of 65+, however, although rare, there have been cases where the disease has started early for people around the age of 40. It is an illness that has skyrocketed over the past 18 years. 13 years ago only 500,000 people were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but now there have been 5,000,000 people in the US alone with the disease. This is amazing considering how over one century ago the disease was so rare it didn’t even have a name! It wasn’t until Alweiss Alzheimer, the discoverer of Alzheimer’s, and the name giver, came across this deadly illness in 1907.

Alzheimer's symptoms may first show up as memory loss or difficulty performing every day thinking tasks that are things the patient never forgets or does wrong, such as simple math problems, or leaving the car keys in the fridge, or going to work in the middle of the morning. They basically show abnormal behavior and conduct abnormal tasks. This is due to the death of nerve cells in the brain that work in the memory center, primarily the Hippocampus. The ability of these cells to communicate with the rest of the nervous system is impaired. Some of the biological signs of Alzheimer's are the formation of clumps in brain called amyloid plaques, as well as tangled nerve fibers called neurofibrillary tangles. The brain, during Alzheimer’s, initially shrinks. This gives people mood swings, can turn a once peaceful person into a violent being, and a variety of other uncommon properties of the average person contaminated by Alzheimer’s.

There is so far no cure to this horrid illness. The worst thing about this illness, however, is the effect of your loved ones and the people around you who are close and how they have to you go through the disease. ‘I am not dying, I am just disappearing before your eyes.’