ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
Alois Alzheimer was a pathologist with a particular interest in the changes caused by diseases of the nervous system. Born in Bavaria in 1864, he studied medicine in three German universities — Wurzburg, Tubingen, and Berlin – receiving his MD in 1887. At this stage he was working on the glands in the ear that produce ear-wax; it was later that he specialized in the pathology of brain diseases, eventually becoming professor and director of a large anatomical laboratory in Munich’s highly regarded Neuro-Pathology Centre. In 1912 he moved to Breslau to become professor and also director of the Psychiatric and Neurological Institute there, where he was able to combine both clinical practice and research. He died in 1915 from heart and kidney failure.
Alzheimer published the first report of the disease that now bears his name in 1907. He examined the brain of a woman in her fifties who had been noted as having rapidly increasing difficulties with memory such that she became lost in her own home, carried objects about with her for no apparent purpose, and sometimes hid them. At times she screamed for no obvious reason and at others appeared to think that she was going to be murdered. Eventually she became totally helpless and had to be admitted to an institution. While there she often wandered about aimlessly, complaining that she didn’t understand why she was there or didn’t know where she was. She called repeatedly for her husband and daughter. Her mental deterioration progressed relentlessly and she died about five years after the disease first started. At this stage she was totally helpless, practically bed-bound, and mentally inaccessible to those around her.
When Alzheimer examined her brain he discovered strange fibrillary material within some of the nerve cells, and collections of abnormal material deposited in the form of disc-like plaques, especially in the cortex.
*23\138\2*
