ABSTRACT
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a slow, progressive and a chronic neurodegenerative disease that results in loss of memory, cognition, language skills and drastic behavioural changes which cause 60–70% of dementia. The word ‘Alzheimer’s’ is derived from the German psychiatrist Dr. Alois Alzheimer (1901), who identified the first case of AD in his 50-year-old woman patient, August Deter. He carefully followed her case until she died in 1906 and he then publicly announced the results of his study. Emil Kraepelin described this disease as one which has its own pathological features and also named Alzheimer’s disease as presenile dementia, a subtype of senile dementia (Berrios 1990). In 1977 at a conference held for scientists who study AD, he concluded that presenile dementia and senile dementia had the same pathological condition, but the causes for each disease are different. Since then, the term ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ was made official in the medical nomenclature (Amaducci et al. 1986). Epidemiological data indicates a potentially considerable increase in the prevalence of the disease over the next two decades. AD affects up to 5% of people over 65 years, rising to 20% of those over 80 years. AD was estimated to double every 20 years to 66 million and 115 million by 2030 and 2050, respectively (World Alzheimer’s Report 2015).
