Alzheimer’S Disease: A Comprehensive Review
The main reason why I chose Alzheimer's disease is that it is the disease the my great-great grandmother started to suffer from in her old age. My grandmother was a large part of my younger childhood. We would regularly visit her and see how she was doing. She was one of the oldest people of our family who was still alive. She lived a long and happy life. She was ninety-three when she died. However, during the last few years of her life she became stricken with Alzheimer's disease. It started slowly, she would call me someone else’s name or forget who I am until I said my name. Then a look of recognition would come across her face and she would start talking to me like she usually did. Overtime it got worse and worse. By the end of her life she didn’t even know me. She died when I was thirteen.
This experience affected me greatly. It was a hard for me to see what was once a smart, quick-witted, and admittedly old woman slowly degrade into a sickly shadow of herself. It was even harder knowing that for the most part there was nothing that we could do other than smile, be patient, and watch her wastes away. The other reason I chose Alzheimer’s disease is that I assumed that it would be well researched. This would make finding articles and research papers on the topic easier for myself. This would allow me to be able to respond to the questions asked of me with relative ease and with detailed descriptions and well researched answers.
Overview
Alzheimer's is a form of neurodegenerative disease. In particular it is a form of dementia, a syndrome that causes the brain to cease to function over the course of many years (World Health Organizaiton, 2017). It is the cause of from 60 to 70 percent of all dementia cases. Th most ways of expressing dementia is memory loss and forgetfulness. A person diagnosed with dementia most likely will only live 8 years after that. CausesGenetics Alzheimers can be either early onset or late-onset. It has been found that late-onset Alzheimer’s Disease or Alzheimer’s Disease is cause by a single gene found on Chromosome 19 called apoliprotein E (APOE) (Bucciarelli, 2015). This gene can befound in three forms the e2, e3, and e4 form. They all are inherited from one parent or the other.
Hypothesis
In recent times their has been a greater understanding of genetics and a greater ability to manipulate them in a controlled and predictable way. My solution for curing Alzheimer’s is to make sure it never has a chance of happening in the first place. This can be done with genetic manipulation and or selection for children without the genetic abnormalitities that cause Alzheimer’s disease. With the invention of CRISPR we could select against the genes that are known to cause Alzheimer’s such as apolipoprotein E (APOE) and genes found on chromosomes 21, such as Amyloid precursor protein, 14, alpha 1-antichymotrypsin gene, or 1 and presenilin 2 (PS2).
