Al-Marsad newspaper: Health experts revealed that Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that causes damage to the nerve cells that transmit vital messages from the brain.
Although dementia and Alzheimer’s disease do not represent a single health condition, both are often used when talking about diseases that eat memory, as both diseases affect millions of people all over the world and constitute a major cause of death worldwide, according to Russia Today.
Dementia occurs when mental decline is severe enough to impair a person’s ability to work and carry out daily activities and cause problems with thinking, reasoning and memory.
Dementia is particularly common among the elderly, as one in 14 people over the age of 65 suffers from this condition, and one in six is over the age of 80, and women are statistically more likely to develop this disease than men.
As for Alzheimer’s disease, it is the most common cause of dementia, a degenerative brain disease that results from complex changes in the brain after cell damage.
The exact cause of Alzheimer’s disease is not yet fully understood, but a number of factors are thought to encourage its development, including advanced age, family history of the disease, untreated depression, and lifestyle factors associated with cardiovascular disease.
Alzheimer’s disease leads to symptoms of dementia such as problems with short-term memory or difficulty paying bills or remembering appointments.
And the British Health Services Authority warned that the first indicator of Alzheimer’s disease is usually simple memory problems, and the appearance of the following symptoms as the condition worsens:
Confusion and getting lost in familiar places
Difficulty planning or making decisions.
Speech and language problems.
Problems moving without assistance or performing self-care tasks.
Personality changes, such as becoming aggressive, demanding, and suspicious of others.
Hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren’t there) and delusions (believing things that aren’t clearly true).
Bad mood or anxiety.