been called the long good-bye because the symptoms progress so gradually. Most often the disease shows itself in the elderly around the age of about eighty, and is rarely seen in people under the age of sixty-five. One of the characteristics of this disease that makes it so hard for scientists to find a cure, are the numerous factors that present themselves in different patients. It seems as if no two cases of Alzheimers can be exactly alike.In 1906 a physician, named Alois Alzheimer, cared for a fifty-one year old patient with severe dementia. Upon her death, he was able to examine her brain at autopsy. Dr. Alzheimer was able to take advantage of recent innovations in microscopy and histological techniques that allowed him to study in detail the cellular components in nervous tissue. He found that the brain of his patient had severe cortical atrophy and described the neurofibrillary bundles and plaques that are now the hallmark for definitive diagnosis of what he at that time called presenile dementia. An account of his first patient was published in 1907. It is a little ironic that reevaluation this case has lead some to believe that this first patient did not suffer from the Alzheimers disease at all. Instead they believe she suffered from a different, rare disease called metachromatic leukodystrophy (Izenberg, 2000). The term Alzheimer's Disease was coined by Emil Kraepelin who pioneered early work that examined psychiatric disorders from a biological perspective. There is some disagreement about whether Kraepelin considered presenile dementia a disease distinct from other forms of dementia, but he referred to"Alzheimer's Disease" in his influential book Psychiatrie, and the name has stuck ever since. Alzheimer's disease gained relatively rapid acceptance as a distinct disease state. In spite of this, it unfortunately gained very little attention until about the 1980s, but has received much attention recently. In fact, it has ...
