Alzheimer’s Disease: Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Treatment

An aggravating type of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. For illnesses that adversely impact memory, thinking, and behaviour, dementia is a general word. Daily life is hampered by the changes. Many different conditions, including diseases and brain traumas, can lead to dementia. The cause is sometimes a mystery.

Forgetting previous discussions or experiences is one of the disease’s early symptoms. A person with Alzheimer’s disease will lose their ability to perform daily duties as the disease worsens and have severe memory loss.

Alzheimer’s disease has no known medication that can reverse the illness’s progression in the brain. Death occurs in the advanced stages of the illness as a result of complications from severe loss of brain function, such as dehydration, starvation, or infection.

Symptoms of Alzheimer’s

The primary sign of Alzheimer’s disease is memory loss. Early warning indications include having trouble recalling previous conversations or occurrences. Memory deficits worsen as the disease advances, and new symptoms appear.

Alzheimer’s disease-related brain alterations cause increasing problems with:

Causes of Alzheimer’s

It is unclear what causes Alzheimer’s disease exactly. But on a fundamental level, brain proteins malfunction, which interferes with the operation of brain cells (neurons) and sets off a chain of harmful events. Damaged neurons lose their connections to one another and finally die. Most often, according to scientists, Alzheimer’s disease results from a confluence of hereditary, dietary, and environmental variables that have an ongoing negative impact on the brain.

Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s disease can now be identified during a person’s lifetime with greater accuracy by doctors and researchers. Biomarkers, such as particular kinds of PET scans or quantifying amyloid and tau proteins in plasma and cerebral spinal fluid, can identify the existence of plaques and tangles.
Some of the common diagnoses include:

Treatment of Alzheimer’s

Memory issues and other cognitive abnormalities may temporarily be helped by current Alzheimer’s treatments. Currently, two types of medications are used to treat cognitive symptoms:

• Cholinesterase inhibitors: These medications function by maintaining a chemical messenger that is reduced in the brain by Alzheimer’s disease, increasing levels of cell-to-cell communication.
• Memantine (Namenda): This medication reduces the progression of symptoms associated with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease by affecting a different brain cell communication network.

However, these drugs may have some side effects like diarrhoea, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances etc in Alzheimer’s patients

Intense research is being conducted globally to develop and construct viable therapeutic options for Alzheimer’s disease with the aid of stem cells in light of the disease’s growing and progressive prevalence.

Many scientists have begun investigating various types of stem cells and their efficient pathways, leading to the regeneration of damaged cells and restoration of lost brain function, in light of the potential ability of stem cells to regenerate lost cells through proper mechanisms underlying stem cell signalling and differentiation pathway.

Originally published at https://www.advancells.com on September 13, 2022.