Memory Loss vs Alzheimer's Disease

Occasionally all of us would have experienced difficulty in remembering some event, face or fact. This is quite natural and is no cause for alarm. Memory will also fade slowly as age progresses, though there are a number of seniors out there who would still remember practically every major event in their lives. Since this is a common symptom of Alzheimer’s disease we need to differentiate between memory loss that is normal vs that which is due to Alzheimer’s disease.

Memory loss occurs in all cases of Alzheimer’s, but in the early stages it can be difficult to detect as people manage to cover it up well. The most recent memories are the first to go, and it's only much later as the Alzheimer’s condition has become much more severe does the past memory become affected.

The things we've done recently such as in the last hours days or even weeks are placed in our short term memory and it's this recent storage capacity that people with Alzheimer’s seem to have problems with.

Because memory loss is such an important feature of Alzheimer’s disease and can also be easily tested for, it forms an important part of the assessment tool which is used to diagnose Alzheimer’s.

A common test which used to be used extensively was to ask the person suspected of having Alzheimer’s a series of questions. These covered both the short and the long term memory.

Ten questions commonly asked included:

• How old are you
• What is your date of birth
• What day is it today
• What month are we in
• What year is it
• When was the first world war
• What is the name of the prime minister
• Where are you now
• Count backwards from 20-1
• Tell them an address, then ask them to repeat it back to you after five minutes

If the person is co-operative and has been asked these questions in a nice way, (not officiously), this is quite an easy test to perform. It's also a useful test to help diagnose Alzheimer's or dementia as it is quick, non invasive and cheap to use. It also gives a rough guide to the areas in the person's memory where there may be problems.

These questions test a person's short term and long term memory problems and they also test for orientation as well.

A low score on its own doesn't prove dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, because not all people will know all the answers to the questions anyway! It's just a guide to prove that something may be wrong and needs further investigation.

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Both Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s Disease affect working memory. However, it is not yet clear if the working memory loss is due to Alzheimer’s disease or is a caused as a secondary effect. Very detailed experiments have proved that even if near term memory does not show any great deterioration, the capability to simultaneously manage two tasks is severely impaired very early in the life cycle of the disease.

Alzheimer’s disease starts by affecting recent memory first. Consequently, a patient will remember small details of old events but has will forget recent actions or conversations. In particular, patients tend to forget things they were adept at earlier – like following a particular recipe or handling money. They may shun making choices due to the confusion it causes and experience trouble learning new things.