Alzheimer is a disease of old age and the number of people with the disease is increasing day by day. This is because the world population is getting older.
The most important reason for the increase in the elderly population is the gradual decrease in the young population and the success of prevention methods developed against diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and cancer, which often cause deaths, which are also successful in prolonging the life span.
Alois Alzheimer (14 June 1864 – 19 December 1915) was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of "presenile dementia", which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer's disease.
After the Second World War, an increase in the fertility rate was observed in the USA and Europe in the 1950s, and this was called the baby boom. This generation, which is much more crowded than its predecessors, had fewer children as it grew up and the population started to age in a way that has never been seen before since the 2000s.
Currently, it is known that there are close to 40 million Alzheimer's patients worldwide, and it is estimated that this number will reach 115 million in 2050.
The first to describe the disease was a German neuropsychiatrist named Alois Alzheimer. In 1902, 51-year-old Auguste Deter was brought to Dr. Alzheimer by his wife for progressive forgetfulness and behavioral disorder. Doctor Alzheimer, who examined and followed the patient, performed an autopsy following the death of the patient in 1906.
In the brain samples he took, thinning of the patient's cortex and different accumulations in and around the cells are encountered. This invention of Alzheimer's, which defines plaque and fiber, was presented in medical congresses in the following years and is known as Alzheimer's disease.
Who?
He is a German neurologist and neuropathologist. He described for the first time the eponymous textural lesions of pre-senile dementia. He was born in Bavaria in 1864. In 1887, he graduated from the Würzburg University Faculty of Medicine and stepped into medicine. After working for a short time in a nursing home for female mental patients, he became a psychiatry and neuropathology specialist. He founded the Munich School of Neurological Diseases. He made important studies examining the pathological anatomy of mental disorders due to general paralysis, chorea, arteriosclerosis, and senility.