No Symptoms? Doesn't Matter: You Still May Have Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s Disease is catastrophic in its impact on not only the patient, but the family and close friends. Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive, neurodegenerative disease characterized in the brain by abnormal clumps (amyloid plaques) and tangled bundles of fibers (neurofibrillary tangles) composed of misplaced proteins. Age is the most important risk factor for AD; the number of people with the disease doubles every 5 years beyond age 65. Your risk is also higher if a family member has had the disease.

Alzheimer’s Disease has a course of 5-20 years. Usually when death does come, it is due to infection.

Alzheimer’s becomes more confounding when one realizes how many other types of dementias ‘look’ like Alzheimer’s, and for the sake of treatment (and perhaps our sanity) are grouped together and symptoms treated empirically.

Now it seems that one can have Alzheimer’s or dementia and no one will notice. Autopsies were done on 150 patients. About 30% of them had been previously diagnosed with dementia. Annual physicals and psychological tests had been done on all 150 patients prior to their deaths. However, at autopsy, 85% of them were diagnosed with dementia. Out of 150 deaths, 80 had enough damage to fulfill all the Neuro-Psych criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease; while only 47 were diagnosed while living.

Few older people die with brains untouched by a pathological process, however, an individual’s likelihood of having clinical signs of dementia increases with the number of different disease processes present in the brain, according to a new study.

The combination of Alzheimer’s disease and cerebral infarcts (strokes) is the most common mix of pathologies in the brains of people with dementia. The implication of these findings is that public health efforts to prevent and treat vascular disease could potentially reduce the occurrence of dementia.

“We know now that people can have Alzheimer’s pathology without having symptoms. The finding that Alzheimer’s pathology with cerebral infarcts is a very common combination in people with dementia adds to emerging evidence that we might be able to reduce some of the risk of dementia with the same tools we use for cardiovascular disease such as control of blood cholesterol levels and hypertension.

Currently, on going research is looking at whether blood pressure control, use of statins for high blood pressure and decreasing blood vessel inflammation and vitamin use is on-going.