Write An Essay About Alzheimer's Disease

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Alzheimer’s Disease

The article, “When Good Proteins Go Bad” written by Tara Haelle, discusses that when trying to prevent or treat a disease, you must first find out what actually drives it. Alzheimer’s along with Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and ALS are all caused by mis-folded proteins in the brain’s cells. Tara states, “Typically when a protein mis-folds, the cell destroys it” (paragraph 2), but as we age, our cells are less capable to distinguish this, thus these mis-folded proteins accumulate in the brain, causing the symptoms of Alzheimer’s including memory loss, hostility, combativeness, the inability to swallow and walk, and even death.
Researchers in Switzerland found that the mis-folded protein cells can mutate with healthy brain …show more content…

A lot of answers in everyday life come from how we got there. What we did along the way to get to a certain point, right? Therefore studying the pathway of mutating cells in our brains can hopefully give us a reason of the end result, Alzheimer’s disease. This disease hits close to home for me because my Great Aunt was diagnosed with this along with Parkinson’s disease about 7 years ago when she was 66. It is a very difficult struggle for her and anyone caring for her over the last 5 years. Medications would work great sometimes, but then the effects of them would wear off and she would need to be started on something else. There are days you cannot tell she even has a disease, physically or mentally, and others, she struggles with transportation as well as memory loss very badly. I do hope one day soon that scientists and researchers can discover the pathway that these mis-folded proteins take and start working on treatment methods to prevent it from going any further. Alzheimer’s is a very difficult disease and very debilitating to the patient’s as well as caregivers. When you are a caregiver for your own family member as well, it can be very hard because you share that relationship with them and know them on a personal level. I could not imagine my parents or husband forgetting who I am because of Alzheimer’s disease. It would be

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