Research has shown that the brain puts up with a lot of distress before it starts to show symptoms of dementia. In this video, HealthMaker William Mobley, MD, PhD, explains how the decline begins and what the signs are.
I think the thing that surprises me is how long the brain suffers quietly before you start having whole networks fall apart and people not being able to remember aspects of recent engagements, events, and facts. It must mean that there's this enormous reserve in the brain that puts up of a lot of craziness, misconnections, things don't work very well.
For a long time before whatever reserve we'll call it is gone, and now you're dealing with a system that, and which even subtle changes seem to really compromise its ability to function. If you talk to a room of people who care for people with the Alzeimer's disease, you'll ask them, do you notice any changes from day to day, or even hour to hour, and almost all of them put their hands up.
My minimal images, it's the light bulb, just not quiet tightly screwed in, and when the wind blows it flickers, right? So, in the normal brain, it is tightly wound, it's tightly screwed in, but as a result of loosening of these connections in the brain, there must be a progressive failure rate in signal transmission that ultimately turns the light bulb off.
William Mobley, MD, PhD, is chair of the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD and a leading expert on Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. He discusses the surprising link between Down syndrome and Alzheimer's.
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