Alzheimer’s Disease: The Features and Quality of Life

Abstract

Among neurodegenerative disease, dementia is the one which affected cerebral cortex. (Grabowski and Damasio, 2004). It has enormous price to community, i.e., higher cost to health and social services, directly and economic price regarding lost productivity of the carers, and families who give funding for the patients, indirectly. One of its type is Alzheimer’s disease (AD). First described by Alois Alzheimer in the early 20th century, he mentioned a middle-aged woman who had cognitive impairment, lower functional level, and experienced psychotic symptoms, i.e., auditory hallucinations, and delusions. (Lovestone, 2009). He also found neurofibrillary tangles and milar foci in his case. (Richards and Sweet, 2009).

Old-age people experience mild declining of memory, executive functioning, and agility to cognitive processing related to their aging process within normal limitation, however it is a different condition with the patients with dementia, they experience all of the symptoms, progressively.   (Solfrizzi et al., 2002). Nowadays, there is increasing prevalence of dementia. It is doubled from 5 to 8 percent at age 65 to 70, to 15 to 25 percent at age 75 to 80, and up to 40 to 50 percent over age 85. In 2050, there will be 11 to 16 million people with AD in United States of America, because of the increasing of aging population. (Richards and Sweet, 2009), and in United Kingdom there will be almost 1.8 million people with dementia by 2051.(Knapp et al., 2007). The clinical features of AD are: cognitive impairment, functional impairment, and neuropsychiatric manifestations, i.e., disturbing behaviour, changing mood, anxiety, changing personality, sleep disturbances, and psychosis. (Richards and Sweet, 2009; Lovestone, 2009).