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Research Paper On Alzheimer's On The Brain

Decent Essays

Most people in today’s society, to some degree, are familiar with the crippling illness known as Alzheimer’s disease. Whether you’ve learned about it through television or the internet, or maybe you have a personal experience working with or having a loved one who suffers from this disorder. Alzheimer’s literally is an illness that causes one to forget. No information preserved in the brain is safe from the disease’s effects. Although short term memory seems to be the most commonly destroyed, it is not impossible for long term memory to be affected as well. Ultimately, you will watch a sufferer of Alzheimer’s progressively forget things in their day to day lives and finally succumb to the disease once it deteriorates their brains to the point …show more content…

These physical changes begin to take effect long before the first symptoms appear, which suggests that it could be possible for screenings in the future to be able to detect and begin treatment for Alzheimer’s before it ever manifests symptoms. The two primary happenings that cause damage in the brain are the buildup of plaque and complications with nerve fibers called tangles. While most people develop a small amount of these over time, people with Alzheimer’s tend to develop much more. It is believed that the buildup of plaque and tangles interferes with the neurons’ ability to communicate with one another, and ultimately results in the death of the cells. The plaques, being a buildup of the protein beta-amyloid, gathers in the spaces between neurons while the tangles are a result of a twisting of an internal protein fiber called “tau”. In the end, these processes are the cause of the extreme memory loss and ultimately …show more content…

And it can be heartbreaking to know that there is no cure for it. I for one used to work as a CNA on a geriatric behavioral unit where the majority of my patients were sufferers of Alzheimer’s. To watch these people lose their dignity and live in constant terror is just heartbreaking. Many of them do not know where they are, let alone why they are there. As such, they typically become combative and either try to escape or engage in fights with others. Explaining the situation to them is futile as they are often incapable of understanding you. Most people, from what I’ve seen, who do not know why or where they are, will manufacture an explanation to explain it. They will refuse to accept any information you provide to the contrary, regardless of evidence. The best you can do for these people is try to comfort them and isolate them if necessary. Sometimes they require medication in order to calm down. But the best that medication can currently hope to do is prolong the inevitable. I once had a patient who would wake up every day with the mentality of a child and she would cry for her mother to come pick her up much of the time she spent awake. No one had the heart to tell her that she was almost 80 years old and her mother had been dead for decades. It was situations like that, that made me decide to work on a medical/surgical floor. It might be selfish, but I want to work with patients who I can actually help and

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