how is Alzheimer’s disease fatal?
In: Biology
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.
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