how is Alzheimer’s disease fatal?
In: Biology
At various levels and locations in the brain, various things happen. Your volitional actions start at the top of the brain in the cortex and recruit any other part of the brain needed in order to initiate and complete that action. If it starts in the lower levels it can affect the things we do automatically (breathe, swallow, blink, regulate the insides of our bodies, etc.). It’s very complex depending on where it starts, how quickly it progresses, etc. Basically, it slowly shuts down all your major functions because your brain is now not able to do that or can only do it poorly.
Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurological degeneration. Basically it causes the progressive loss of neurons, which are the cells in your brain that make up your nervous system.
While the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are the common forgetfulness, loss of abstract thought, etc., as the disease becomes more severe you start to pretty much lose the ability to take care of yourself at all. Complete lack of speech, total apathy, exhaustion, etc. Patients tend to die “with” Alzheimer’s more than they die “of” it – dying of a complication like pneumonia or an infection that they get from being bedridden.
I’ve worked in dementia care for many years, most of the deaths have seen have been secondary infections but caused by the reasons already listed, dysphagia can lead to aspiration and then pneumonia and ive seen this happen many times, no matter how careful you are with thickened fluids and modified diets, all it takes is a breath in at the wrong time 🙁
The thing with Alzheimer is that it usually affects old people so it’s pretty common that they develop along the line another disease that weaken them and finally kill them. It’s also more common to die of “little” diseases for someone with alzheimer’s because they won’t really complain about their sickness because of the confuse state of mind.
But in young people affected by the disease, you can really see how far it progresses. It’s not only forgetting your life. You start to forget words, orientation, logic, you can’t understand simple command and slowly start to lose motricity because you just forget how to walk. Very late stage alzheimer patient in ther 40’s/50’s can’t walk unassissted or at all.
And you start to forget how to swallow food too so you develop more pneumonia and die and if that doesn’t happen, you can “forget” how to breathe automatically and be put on a ventilator until your body give up for successive infections.
I’m not a neurological expert, but my sister has two years of medical school with a neurological focus. And our father died of Alzheimer’s a couple of months ago, so perhaps I’m more familiar than a lot of people.
The stereotypical view of Alzheimer’s and other kinds of dementia is that you start forgetting memories. That’s part of it, but your brain is more than just memories. It also controls the basic function of your body.
At some point your subconscious “body maintenance” brain areas start to fail as well. So you might “forget” how to breathe, or how to make your heart beat, or how to swallow your food, even though these are not things that you control “consciously” in the first place.
In my dad’s case he was moving towards the concept of forgetting how to swallow. At that point we put him into hospice. That’s the point where he fell and started complaining about pain, and he pretty much stopped caring about eating anyway. The nursing staff put him on morphine to help transition him across to the other side with a minimum of pain — he spent most of his last couple of weeks in a morphine coma.
So the loss of body function was very close — he died from loss of “caring about survival” more than anything else.
My mother’s Alzheimer’s started with the inability to read our write but she seemed otherwise fine. She has what some call a “type” of Alzheimer’s & others call a co-commitant disease called Posterior Cortical Atrophy. By the time I got her to a doctor who knew what he was doing, 2″ of the back of her brain had atrophied. I know this isn’t exactly the information you were looking for, I just wanted to make everyone aware that the memory isn’t always the first thing to go.
Think of a bunch of tangled fairy lights. They’re all turned on and working – this is a healthy brain. With Alzheimers, your brain shrinks. As it shrinks, the fairy lights that are responsible for different things – their bulbs get broken and they can’t turn back on again.
Only everyone’s fairy lights are tangled differently (because we all have different lives) so for some people the fairy lights for short term memory are the first to turn off. For some people it might be the fairy lights for speech.
One by one these lights turn off – this is the progression of Alzheimer’s. There are generally two ways of dying with Alzheimer’s.
The first is that an integral fairy light dies. Perhaps the one responsible for your autonomic system (breathing, heartbeat). This would be a very quick death caused by Alzheimer’s. Without these fairy lights, the others can’t function.
The second is through secondary illness or infection. Say your waterworks fairy light goes and you get an infection. This is a massive power drain on your other lights, and they fade. Or the fairy light for chewing and swallowing is broken, so you aspirate some food and get a bad case of pneumonia.
Chances are in these instances that the fairy light for your immune system is dead or dying meaning the drain on the full system eventually just causes them all to turn off.
Look at the MRI scans of affected pateints, it turns your brain to custard man
Usually they die of a stroke as a result, at least that was how granny went
My Grandmother died from Alzheimer’s directly and not from complications which is rare. In the late stages she was in a vegitative state and eventually the amyloid plaque attacked her brainstem which is responsible for your core organ functions and she just stopped breathing. She had been on a feeding tube in a home for years. The only solace is that when you get this far gone, you’re not concious to suffer.
I have known 2 people who have had Alzheimer’s and they both took an ‘accidental’ overdose when things started to get to bad and everybody that knew them knew it was the best way out. Its horrible to watch the person you knew disappear bit by bit.
Voluntary euthanasia should be an option for terminal diseases.
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