How does Alzheimer’s kill you?
In: Biology
It starts with cognitive decline, but when that’s gone proceeds to more basic brain functionality.
Eventually the person will forget how to clean themselves, develop eating disorders, and eventually even breathing is affected.
Death is a side effect of these – poor hygiene and infections, malnutrition, hypoxia, fainting at an inopportune moment (leading to fall trauma), etc.
your body forgets how to do things like swallowing, which makes it impossible to eat or take fluids orally. it’s so sad. my mom is in late stages of Alzheimer’s and i dread the day she can’t swallow anymore.
It usually doesn’t kill you directly, despite it essentially being your brain decaying. Most people with it die from pneumonia after incorrectly swallowing fluids into their lungs.
you forget how horrible tr*mp’s last term was and vote for him again
you forget how horrible tr*mp’s last term was and vote for him again
Never knew much about Alzheimer’s and glad this question was asked and that I ended up here. The comments break my heart. Wouldn’t wish this on anyone.
Quite often oneumonia as you eventually forget how to cough. So now your body has no way of removing pathogens from the lungs.
Thank you to everyone who commented, it’s so sad to hear about the effects of it.
Alzheimer is basically a brain atrophy that you cannot stop its progression. Since many functions your body are dependent on your brain, you start to lose those functions slowly. So this is more than a cognitive decline or forgetting things. At one point your brain isn’t capable of keeping you alive. Because you lost so many neurons and your brain got shrunk.
It usually doesn’t. Most people have comorbidities. But when it does, it’s the worst death I can imagine. I worked with one lady who only had Alzheimer’s. When I met her, she didn’t speak, but she could walk around the unit, sip her coffee, and sit in on activities. Over years (years…. it’s long) she forgot how to walk, forgot how to eat and drink, at the end she was laying in the bed staring and you could see the fear in her eyes because she had forgotten *everything*…. who she was, what and where she was, how to anything. I didn’t see her last day, so I don’t know if she aspirated, or slowly starved (her end of life plan would not have included a feeding tube) or simply died of “old age,” but the very last day has little bearing on the long slow death I watched her endure.
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