ARTICLES / Alzheimer's /
Alzheimer’s Disease, the Most Common... /
Other ArticlesBy Janie Rosman
My neighbor was taking one of his
thrice-daily strolls with his caregiver, Celia,
the other day when he stopped in front of a
tissue discarded on the hallway floor. Moving to
pick it up, he was stopped by Celia. “He likes
to pick things up off the floor whether they
belong to him or not,” she told me.
I smiled empathetically as she gently put his
hand back on the walker’s handle. “He wants his own
way all the time; and if he doesn’t get it, he gets
angry,” she said.
“Although several years younger, my dad is the
same,” I told her. “He wants to be in charge.”
“He’s been living with Alzheimer’s disease,” one
doctor told us. He was right, it turns out; AD is
the most common — yet not the only — form of
dementia in people 65 and older, according to
Alzheimer’s Weekly, and accounts for between 50 and
70 percent of all dementias.
Dementia is defined as “a collection of symptoms
that are caused by disorders affecting the brain and
is not one specific disease” by Alzheimer’s
Australia, the peak group that provides support and
advocacy for the 257,000 Australians living with it.
While the cause of most dementia is unknown, its
final stage involves loss of memory, reasoning,
speech, and other cognitive functions, and risks of
developing dementia increase with age, according to
the National Institute on Aging.
Caused by a variety of illnesses, dementia can
occur as the result of a stroke (vascular dementia),
Parkinson's disease, a brain tumor, a thyroid or
other metabolic or endocrine disorder, or any number
of reasons; proper diagnosis is necessary to ensure
correct treatment.
Data from the 2007 nationally-representative
Health and Retirement study concluded that one in
seven Americans over age 70 has some form of
dementia.
Dementia classifications group disorders that
have similar features, such as whether they are
progressive or what parts of the brain are affected.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and
Stroke lists some frequently-used classifications:
Cortical dementia
— brain damage primarily affects the
brain's cortex, or outer layer; tends to cause
memory, language, thinking, and social behavior
problems.
Subcortical dementia
— affects parts of the brain below the cortex; tends
to cause emotional and movement changes and memory
problems.
