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The History of Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive and degenerative brain disease discovered by Dr. Alois Alzheimer. The disease is a form of dementia that affects behavior, thinking and memory.

  1. Similarities to Other Diseases

    • Dr. Alzheimer discovered the disease that would bear his name in the early 1900s while working at the university psychiatric clinic in Munich. He also described brain changes in arteriosclerosis and epilepsy, and loss of nerve cells in Huntington's chorea.

    The First Alzheimer's Disease Patient

    • In 1901, the family of a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter became Dr. Alzheimer's patient. According to Auguste's family, she had problems with memory, difficulty speaking and understanding anything that was said to her, and baseless suspicions that her husband was being unfaithful. She was also disoriented and was hiding things.

    Treating Auguste Deter

    • Auguste was admitted to the Frankfurt Psychiatric hospital and subsequently institutionalized. During Dr. Alzheimer's initial examination of Auguste she couldn't remember her husband's name, the year, or how long she had been at the hospital. Among other things, she became agitated and had hallucinations and odd fears. After her symptoms worsened and she lost other cognitive functions, Auguste eventually became bedridden, and died in 1906.

    Diagnosing the Disease

    • Because Dr. Alzheimer had never seen anything quite like Auguste's disease, her family gave Alzheimer permission to perform an autopsy. Alzheimer was astounded when he saw several things in Auguste's brain that puzzled him; first he found significant shrinkage in the part of the brain involved with memory, thinking, judgment and speech. When he put parts of the brain under a microscope, he found lots of fatty deposits in small blood vessels, abnormal deposits in and around cells, and dead and dying brain cells.

    Alzheimer's Disease Is Published

    • Although Dr. Alzheimer was reluctant, his colleague Dr. Emil Kraepelin suggested the disease bear Alzheimer's name. The condition entered the medical literature in 1907, when Alzheimer published his observations.

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