Is there any cure for Alzheimer’s disease?

Описание: Hello Friends. My name is Dr. Deepak Garg, consultant neurosurgeon.
We will be talking about Alzheimer's disease today: What it is, causes, symptoms, effects and which people get most affected by it and at last how it can be modified and treated. So, Alzheimer's disease is defined as the problem of forgetting things and is usually found in old people. This problem falls under dementia and about 60-70 percent of patients suffer through Alzheimer’s disease and the remaining ones are the dementia patients. What can be the cause of this Alzheimer’s disease? It is a genetically transferred ailment. If any one in the family has this disease then the chances of getting affected from it increases for other members. If Alzheimer patients are consuming alcohol, smoking or following a sedentary lifestyle then this can worsen their ailment. So, it should be managed well. Why does this problem arise? The brain has some protein deposits such as Amyloid-beta precursor proteins, tau proteins,microfibrillar proteins. There is one area called the hippocampus inside your brain that processes your memory and Alzheimer's disease also affects the cerebral cortex. These protein deposits prevent the current passing through the brain circuits or the messages between the brain circuits making them completely defective. Due to this, memory impairment or thinking process impairment come into play. Later on, it may worsen such that the patients can’t initiate anything. Due to dementia, patients can even undergo depression or there can be some psychological features. An Alzheimer's patient cannot remember his timely things, cannot coordinate with time. With the passage of time, they start facing language issues too. They find it difficult to speak, work or initiate anything. They speak something else instead of something else. At the final stage, they entirely stop speaking and get dependant on their family members to look after them properly. Alzheimer’s disease needs to be completely differentiated. You can’t say that a person is suffering through this issue in just one go. Its diagnosis is biopsy but it is unreasonable to start with biopsy since it can only be done after patient’s death. We have to undergo clinical diagnosis such that other diseases can get ruled out. For that, we can opt for CT scan or MRI to check if there is any tumour or other disease that’s causing memory impairment. If that’s not the case then we suspect that it is alzheimer’s disease. Their attention, language and other parameters are checked by doctors. Based on the above factors, scoring is finalised and this scoring helps determine whether the patient has dementia or it can possibly be due to Alzheimer. After clinical diagnosis and ruling out of other diseases, we can say it is Alzheimer. APOE4 is a gene that forms apolipoprotein commonly found in alzheimer. This gene can be tested and diagnosed well to figure out the cause of alzheimer’s ailment. There are two types of dementia: subcortical and cortical dementia. Cortex is mainly the outer covering or the main function of the brain that secludes you from other species. If this part of brain is causing you dementia then the patient is possibly suffering through alzheimer’s disease. The other part is called sub-cortex that is the old layer of the brain that is the cause of subcortical dementia which can lead to lewy body dementia or huntington chorea or Basal ganglia calcification. So that needs to be differentiated properly. In alzheimer’s disease, what happens is the person cant remember properly whereas in case of subcortical dementia, a person is believed to be able to recall if given a clue. Depression, apathy is more common in alzheimer patients as compared to subcortical dementia. Patients with subcortical dementia show symptoms like chorea, tremors, staggering and improper body movements. Other methods like signal photon aspect spectrum, angiography can be done but patients don’t show any such reasonable characteristics like that to undergo any of the above. Such patients need to be taken care of well and the risk factors like smoking, alchohol should be restricted. More focus should be given to physical exercises by alzheimer patients. Generally, alzheimer patients have the age group of 60-70. This disease cant be cured but can be managed to some extent using drugs like donepezil, galantamine, Rivastigmine. When the brain messenger molecule lessens then Acetilcolina helps regulating the amount of the molecule and bring it back to normal. It helps improve the patient’s memory. If patient has any depression or anxiety symptoms then later on anti-depressants are given. So extra care is given to the patients. Other diseases are ruled out while diagnosis. There can be other causes of dementia. Thankyou friends. For more information, kindly subscribe to our channel.