Symptoms
In the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, it often manifests itself through a creeping increase in forgetfulness, especially the function of the short-term memory is affected relatively early in the course of the disease. Vocabulary is limited, word finding disorders occur and patients find it difficult to orientate themselves in less familiar surroundings. It is not uncommon for the patients to appear mentally out of sorts, inhibited and apathetic, so that it is not always easy to exclude the clinical picture from depression.
As the disease progresses, the symptoms increase, the patients do not recognize familiar people and environments, speech and arithmetic skills decline and the patients forget simple skills, e.g. in the household. In an advanced stage of the disease, a number of psychological problems can arise, such as aggressiveness, hallucinations, delusions and general anxiety. Above all this personality decline is a great burden for relatives.
In later stages, severe disorders in memory, speech, recognition of persons or objects and disorientation become apparent. In addition, there are motor coordination disorders, frequent falls and possibly loss of control over urine and stool. In the final stage of the disease, patients are bedridden, completely dependent on outside help and unable to communicate with their surroundings. Death usually occurs within 8-12 years after diagnosis, often due to secondary diseases such as pneumonia, which result from the poor general condition of those affected. In the final stage of the disease, patients are bedridden, completely dependent on outside help and unable to communicate with their surroundings.Death usually occurs within 8-12 years of diagnosis, often due to secondary diseases such as pneumonia resulting from the poor general condition of those affected.
Exclusionary diseases (differential diagnoses)
It is important to distinguish Alzheimer’s disease from other causes of dementia, which may be more easily treatable. These include, above all, circulatory disorders of the brain (second most common cause of dementia), infections, storage diseases (e.g. Wilson’s disease), vitamin deficiency, alcoholic-toxic dementia and other brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease or progressive supranuclear eye paresis. Sometimes there is also a relatively large overlap in the symptom patterns of Alzheimer’s dementia and depression.
