What Is Alzheimer's Disease?

What Is Alzheimer's Disease?
Alzheimer's disease is a brain disorder that mostly affects people as they get older. The disease is known to cause memory loss in its victims. The disease is a form of dementia which results from the prevalence of plaques and tangles.

Plaques and tangles are protein deposits which accumulate in between nerve cells therefore preventing the passing of signals between the nerve cells. This communication between the nerve cells is responsible for the brain's ability to remember, learn or perform other important brain functions successfully. Tangles on the other hand are protein deposits right inside of the nerve cells. There are theories that tend to suggest that tangles prevent the nerve cells from communicating withy each other. There are allegations to the effect that this blocked communication leads to the death of most of the nerve cells and the excessive deaths of these cells eventually make the brain unable to function naturally.

The disease is more than prevalent as people get older. This perhaps is attributable to the fact that every body is bound to lose a few nerve cells as they grow older. it is however not clearly known what makes some people to lose a great amount of nerves leading to Alzheimer's disease. Most people with this condition start experiencing memory lapses from the age of 65 or there about. Their situation eventually deteriorates steadily with age.

Known factors that lead to Alzheimer's disease

Other than age, it has been proven that the disease tends to have some hereditary trends. It has genetic influence as it mostly occurs in members of a family. The genetic factors that lead to this condition have been studied in depth and two particular genes have been categorically picked to be predominantly significant in the development of the disease. ApoE 4 is one of the risk genes that contribute to the development of the disease; it is nonetheless not guaranteed that it directly causes the disease. The other gene is a deterministic gene which is however not very common as it is only traceable in a few hundreds of families in the whole world. The only difference between this gene and the ApoE 4 is the fact that almost all persons with this gene end up developing the Alzheimer's disease and unfortunately at n even much earlier age than other victims.

Family factors and genes are factors which are absolutely out of or control. There are however some other factors which will most likely lead to the development of the disease are a person's personal life style. One identified factor is the cause of head injuries either due to accidents or any other reason.