Alzheimer’s Disease: Deterioration of Mind

Our nervous system provides us with an array of means through which we can perceive our surroundings. Hearing, seeing, touching, feeling, name it, you’ve got it! But these are just the major capacities we are luckily endowed with to perceive our surroundings. Highlight, too, our capacity to recall events that took place early in life.

But in middle age, patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease can no longer grasp the significance of a situation at hand. At some point he may react with it inappropriately. This is a clear demonstration of losing the state of being reasonable and an impairment of judgment. Memories of the past gradually go with the wind and even the most recent events become a trouble to recall.

What’s worse, physical appearance and personal hygiene, and, finally, the command of sound language progressively deteriorates. The patient, however domesticated all his life, may get lost in his own house and wander about aimlessly. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease seems to be anywhere near to being a juggernaut, that is, nothing in its way can halt the progression of the process, and the patient becomes a prisoner quite helplessly to his own bed.

While all of these can happen in our middle age, dementia occurs far at some later time.

Dementia is another mental deterioration similar in symptoms to Alzheimer’s disease, which is the unsoundness of mind resulting from organic or functional disorders and leading to total loss or serious impairment of the faculty of coherent thought.

Whether the mental deterioration seen in some aged patients is a specific brain degeneration or is secondary to cerebral arteriosclerosis is not yet settled. However, it appears that dementia is probably secondary to a degenerative process similar to that of Alzheimer’s disease but occurring later in life.

Clearly, that is the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, the latter having more tendencies to appear earlier than the former. As such, the more appropriate term for dementia is ‘senile dementia’ and for Alzheimer’s disease ‘presenile dementia.’

Although different in time of occurrence, both dementia’s can be brought about in various ways: infection, brain injury, such toxic states as alcoholism, brain tumors, cerebral arteriosclerosis, and so forth.

Whether or not dementia can be halted depends on its cause. For instance, if the dementia is secondary to brain infection or exposure to toxic material, eradication of the infectious agent or removal of the toxin may be of distinct benefit in arresting the dementia process. Unfortunately, there is no specific treatment for the brain degenerative processes.