According to the National Institute of Health describes the four different stages of Alzheimers as: preclinical > mild > moderate > severe.
The AARP describes the metaphor that Alzheimers would nest inside of dementia and is 60-80% of cases of dementia.
Alzheimers is a type of dementia, which is loss of thinking, remembering and reasoning. (Other types of dementia can be: frontotemporal disorder, vascular and Lewy body–which are protein deposits in the brain–the loss of neurotransmitters, the chemicals between brain cells; Parkinsons is another risk factor for Lewy body dementia.)
As I’m wont to do, I was also curiously asking myself who is Alzheimer? So, I turned to my reliable go-to-wiki. As wikipedia is wont to do: i learned some amazing details. (see the postscript below)
Mayo Clinic says that dementia is an umbrella term for many symptoms while Alzheimers is a disease that first affects the learning part of the brain resulting in changes to memory and thinking and reasoning.
A few of AARP’s descriptions, in the simplest terms are:
- dementia is a decline of mental function
- must be severe enough to interfere with daily life .
… mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is “forgetfulness beyond what is expected of aging” in the words of Ron Petersen, a director at Mayo Clinic.
AARP describes the diagnosis for dementia as: a doctor finding that you have two cognitive or behavioral areas in decline, among these options: “disorientation, disorganization, language impairment, mood change, personality change and memory loss.” Also, states that emotional changes may precede memory issues: “growing medical consensus that irritability, depression and anxiety often flag dementia before memory issues”
To determine if somebody is experiencing decline in health, some of the social-emotional-intellectual measures are a how many words on this list can you remember sort of memory game along with a test where you “draw lines to connect a series of numbers and letters in a complicated sequence.”
post-script: a few moments in the fascinating life of Alois Alzheimer, the doctor who’s name possesses this disease and diagnosis:
- Controversy in ethics: paying for five years of care for Auguste Deter, a woman at a care facility in Frankfurt who’s husband/family could not afford that facility, so Alzheimer paid for her accomodations until her death for guarantee of access to “her records and brain.” I’m trying to comprehend if this was a sort of insurance policy and/or bartering of goods for services.
- Was married for 7 years to Cecile Geisenheimer, they had 3 children, before her death in 1901.
- Died at 51.
- There were other doctors and researchers who were contemporaries, analyzing the brain and possibly coming to similar conclusions as Alzheimer. Their names were Fuller and Fischer — so we were a few fateful moments from maybe knowing this disease as Fuller’s or Fischer’s instead of Alzheimer’s.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 