What is Alzheimer's?

Alzheimer's is a disease that affects your mind. It starts off slow where you forget little things like picking up eggs at the grocery store and over time it develops to more serious things that you forget how to do, like to tell time or to dial a telephone. These things may seem minor at first, but grow to become major hurtles in your daily life. Eventually you will need help doing daily tasks like with feeding themselves and dressing yourself and they need constant care to take care of themselves. Finally, the patient would forget how to swallow and their body shuts down.

According to Public Medical Health, "Dementia is a loss of brain function that occurs with certain diseases. Alzheimer's disease (AD), is one form of dementia that gradually gets worse over time. It affects memory, thinking, and behavior. Memory impairment, as well as problems with language, decision-making ability, judgment, and personality, are necessary features for the diagnosis." This disease is genetic and usually you start showing symptoms when your sixty or older. According to researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, "The brains of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease start shrinking up to a decade before symptoms appear, a new study finds". Imagine ten years before you even knew you had Alzheimer's disease, your brain already was decomposing.





In both of the pictures above, the left side is a picture of normal brain function, on the right is a picture of a brain suffering from Alzheimer's disease. These two pictures show the affect Alzheimer's disease has on your brain and how serious this medical condition can be.

As you can imagine, this would be a horrible way to die, which is why my quality project was to help raise money to find a cure in dedication to my grandmother. I would like to stop suffering from Alzheimer's because I watched my grandmother, Lynn Klein go through the horrible stages of Alzheimer's and I hope to minimize the suffering of other families by raising money to help medical research and funding care homes for people suffering with this disease.