A German neuropathologist and psychiatrist named Alois Alzheimer (see “Alois Alzheimer” box) studied a 51-year-old female patient with severe dementia. The woman started experiencing symptoms five years earlier, such as memory loss and trouble reading and writing. She rapidly declined to hallucinations and was unable to take care of herself.
Dr. Alois Alzheimer was born on June 14, 1864, in Bavaria.
He attended the universities of Aschaffenburg, Tubingen, Berlin, and Wurzburg, where he received a medical degree in 1887. The following year, Alzheimer joined the medical staff at the city mental asylum in Frankfurt, Germany. While he first began his career in psychiatry, Alzheimer quickly devoted himself to his great interest of neuropathology, the study of the causes, nature, and effects of brain diseases.
In 1903, he moved to the university psychiatric clinic in Munich. He recorded his findings on his first AD patient in 1907. For the next ten years, he studied patients with syphilis, Huntington’s disease, epilepsy, and a pseudosclerosis of the brain now known as Wilson’s disease. Alois Alzheimer died on December 19, 1915, at the age of 51, due to cardiac failure following endocarditis, inflammation of the membrane that lines the heart and forms part of the heart valves.
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