As America's population ages, the rate of Alzheimer's disease is skyrocketing. In this video, Dr. Rudy Tanzi explains what the disease is and why it's so devastating.
At the personal level, it's hard to come up with a disease worse than Alzheimer's disease, because Alzheimer's robs you of yourself, it's a thief of personality. So if you think about your life, from day one you're accumulating experiences and memories. Every single day as you take in information, you're associating it with what you've already learned and what you've already experienced.
So everything about who you are, your person-hood, how people think about you, your behavior is based on your experiences and memories. It's experiences and memories that alzheimer's disease just robs you of. The disease robs you of yourself, you're still in there, you're still conscious, you're still having mental activity, but the person you are and a person who people know slowly is a rodent.
So how can you have a disease that's worst than that, that actually [xx] who you are. The reason for it is that you develop two particular pathological features in the brain.
Bruce Miller, MD, is a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. He directs the UCSF dementia center where patients in the San Francisco Bay Area receive comprehensive clinical evaluations.
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