Alzheimer’s, here are the first symptoms

One of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s, in some cases, is difficulty in accounting for expenses. But there is not only this.

Small forgetfulness, some carelessness, the words that remain on the tip of the tongue and then, that strange new craze to count and recount money. In the elderly, it is often trivial symptoms like these that must make us suspect that something is wrong.

It happens to everyone sooner or later to go through a period in which we are more distracted and careless than usual. Stress or fatigue generally explain even the most bizarre forgetfulness and behaviors such as leaving keys in the refrigerator or bread in the bathroom.

Minimizing and waiting for it to pass is not always the best solution, especially if you are a little older.

Behind these small daily incidents, in fact, other types of problems could hide, such as depression, which are solvable but only if diagnosed and treated with the appropriate therapy. And there is also the possibility that it is a more serious disease such as Alzheimer’s.

It is a degenerative brain disease characterized by a progressive decline in cognitive functions and memory in particular. This leads to an increasing difficulty in carrying out common daily activities, up to the complete loss of personal autonomy.

A cure that can solve or block the problem does not currently exist. However, early diagnosis and early initiation of symptom-targeted treatments can at least slow down their progression.

According to the US Alzheimer’s Association, there are ten symptoms to watch out for:

Symptom Demonstration
Anterograde amnesia Forgetfulness and memory disorders especially for the most recent events
Apraxia Difficulty performing familiar tasks such as tying shoes or buttoning that are not due to physical disabilities
Agnosia Difficulty recognizing everyday objects and their functions
Anomie Difficulty in naming common things that are recognized
Spatial disorientation Confusing familiar places
Temporal disorientation Getting the month, season or year wrong
Acalculia Difficulties in performing relatively simple logical or mathematical operations which may involve, for example, having to count and recount Money
Losing items Tendency to continually lose things by forgetting them in the strangest places (keys in the refrigerator, linen in the kitchen)
Mood or personality changes Tendency to become confused, suspicious, depressed, fearful, anxious, upset
Apathy Loss of initiative and interest in oneself, others and the environment in general

Those strange disease spies

Counting and recounting money is a rather peculiar symptom. Usually, Alzheimer’s begins in a subtle way with memory problems that become increasingly frequent and severe. Forgotten appointments, names of objects that do not come to mind, amnesia regarding dates or addresses.

And in a certain sense, counting and recounting money can also depend on a memory problem: if you are distracted while you are performing an action such as paying or giving money to someone it can happen that you then find yourself fiddling with coins waiting to remember what you were going to do.

It also happens to healthy people, but in patients with Alzheimer’s it can become a particularly frequent phenomenon and not always explainable by obvious interruptions.

However, there are also other dysfunctions typical of Alzheimer’s that can explain this symptom.

They have difficult names, but they lead back to common actions: agnosia, that is, the inability to recognize common things, acalculia for which he can no longer perform elementary mathematical operations or apraxia which is instead an inability to perform normal gestures such as in this case handling money.

If you have a tendency to count and recount money or notice it in a family member, however, there is no need to be frightened: stress or fatigue can explain this symptom just as well.

However, when in doubt, it is always better to bring this symptom to the attention of a doctor.

The most bizarre methods to stanarla

Distinguishing Alzheimer’s from normal aging solely on the basis of one or more symptoms is not easy even for experts.

The exact causes of the disease are not known and the only elements that could help are anatomical brain lesions that are detected only with invasive examinations such as biopsy or autopsy after death.

For these reasons, much of Alzheimer’s research is geared towards finding a characteristic that is both disease-specific and detectable with a simple, non-invasive clinical examination.

The results are not lacking, although some of the diagnostic systems found so far are rather bizarre.

Look into my eyes

For example, according to the Americans Huntington Potter and Leonard Scinto, respectively neurologist and ophthalmologist, a drop of eye drops would be enough to understand if a person has Alzheimer’s.

Those suffering from this disease show a sharp decrease in the brain of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and neurons that use it and that are involved in pupil control.

According to the two scholars, a drop of eye drops containing tropicamide (a substance that blocks acetylcholine) causes pupil dilation even in healthy people, but in the patient the action is much more marked because the drug deactivates the little acetylcholine left to counteract the enlargement of the pupil.

The discovery is as revolutionary as it is simple and opens up new hope for scientific research in this field.

Another group of American researchers also hopes to be able to diagnose Alzheimer’s simply by looking into the eyes of patients.

This time, however, looking not for an alteration of the pupil diameter, but for some inclusions in the vitreous body due to deposits of the same proteins that accumulate in the brain.

From nose to mouth

It is not the first time that scholars have tried the way of the sense organs to diagnose Alzheimer’s.

In 2004, Devangere Devanand and colleagues at Columbia University presented a new type of test that would have allowed them to diagnose pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease simply by having at-risk patients smell a series of ten fragrances.

The researchers had noticed that among individuals at greater risk for Alzheimer’s because, for example, they had family history, those with olfactory defects almost certainly developed the disease.

The presence of an olfactory deficit should therefore have represented a good predictive signal to identify people who over time would have developed this type of senile dementia.

The near future could offer interesting diagnostic tools also with regard to taste.

A group of researchers from Washington University led by Katherine Piwnica-Worms has discovered a correlation between difficulty recognizing the meaning of words and defects in identifying food tastes.

Studying people with semantic dementia, a particular type of dementia characterized by a loss of the ability to grasp the meaning of words, the team noticed that often those with this disease develop a remarkable gluttony associated with a preference for unusual foods or unusual combinations of flavors.

According to scholars, this behavior would depend on a loss of the meaning of flavors. And, in fact, they have managed to show that these people are perfectly capable of discriminating different flavors and indicating whether or not they find certain combinations pleasant, but they have considerable difficulty in identifying individual flavors or in appropriately evaluating particular tastes, such as vanilla or pickle.

It is the first direct evidence that the meaning of flavors, like that of other things in the world, is affected by this particular form of dementia. But it is not excluded that it may also represent a new possibility to diagnose and distinguish at an early stage different neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, starting from the simple analysis of people’s food tastes.

Beware of small signals

Unfortunately, none of these non-invasive methods has proved so infallible and to date only the careful clinical and neurological evaluation of cognitive and behavioral symptoms and their tendency to worsen over time, allows us to arrive at a clinical diagnosis.

If carried out correctly and above all promptly, it allows you to start that series of pharmacological treatments and behavioral therapies that if not really curative can maintain a good quality of life for a long time of those affected and their families.

The time factor is therefore fundamental and that is why doctors try to sensitize the population to the alarm bells that could make them suspect the existence of a problem of this type, including counting money.

Joycelyn Elders is the author and creator of EmpowerEssence, a health and wellness blog. Elders is a respected public health advocate and pediatrician dedicated to promoting general health and well-being.

The blog covers a wide range of topics related to health and wellness, with articles organized into several categories.

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