If Alzheimer’s is a disease of the memory, how do people die from it?
Dr. Maurizio Grimaldi
Alzheimer’s disease is a complex disease. The disease is not only a memory disease as it manifests initially with a marked memory failure. Learning and higher brain functions are also affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
When the clinical picture of the disease is fully developed the patient cannot remember who they are, what to do, what they have done and what needs to be done. They do not perform the tasks that keep our body alive and functioning. In the final stages, lack of feeding and swallowing problems also set in.
The typical case affects an elderly person in their sixties or seventies or eighties. The lack of self awareness and care, prolonged bedding, feeding failure and incapacity to provide proper nutrients are all factors in the development of other life threatening diseases.
So typically complications of Alzheimer’s are heart attacks, thromboembolisms, strokes, kidney failure, infections of the lung due to aspiration of food and so on. Multi-organ failure is usually the cause of death in these patients.
Maurizio Grimaldi, MD, Ph.D. is the Leader of the Neuropharmacology/neuroscience Laboratory at Southern Research Institute in Birmingham, Alabama. Specializing Dr. Grimaldi directs the laboratory of neuropharmacology where he conducts research on brain physiology and treatment agents for CNS diseases such as Alzheimer’s and brain tumors. Visit him at www.SouthernResearch.com.