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Page: History
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In 1901, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist, interviewed a patient named Mrs. Auguste D., age 51. She was brought in by her husband, Karl Deter, who could not care for her declining mental health any longer. Dr. Alzheimer showed her several objects and later asked her what she had been shown. She could not recall. He would initially record her behavior as "amnesic writing disorder," but Mrs. Auguste D would be the first patient to be identified with Alzheimer's disease.
Alzheimer would later work in the laboratory of the preeminent Emil Kraepelin in Munich, Germany. Kraepelin was the author of a leading textbook in psychiatry and was a strong believer that neuropathology could be linked to clinical psychiatric function. Early in April 1906, Auguste D. died, and Alzheimer worked with two Italian physicians to examine her anatomy and neuropathology. On November 3, 1906, he presented Auguste D.'s case to the 37th Assembly of Southwest German Psychiatrists and described the neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques that have come to be considered the hallmark of the disease. Kraepelin would later write about this case and others in his "Textbook for Students and Doctors" and index them under "Alzheimer's disease". By 1910, this denomination for the disease was well established among the specialist community.
For most of the twentieth century, the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease was reserved for individuals between the ages of 45-65 who developed symptoms of presenile dementia due to the histopathologic process discovered by Dr. Alzheimer (see below for description of brain tissue changes). During this time senile dementia itself (as a set of symptoms) was considered to be a more or less normal outcome of the aging process, and thought to be due to age-related brain arterial "hardening." In the 1970s and early-1980s, because the symptoms and brain pathology were identical for Alzheimer victims older and younger than age 65, the name "Alzheimer's disease" began to be used, within and outside the medical profession, equally for afflicted individuals of all ages, although in this period the term senile dementia of the Alzheimer type (SDAT) was often used to distinguish those over 65 who did not fit the classical age criterion. Eventually, the term Alzheimer's disease was adopted formally in the psychiatric and neurological nomenclature to describe individuals of all ages with the characteristic common symptom pattern, disease course, and neuropathology. The term Alzheimer disease (without the apostrophe and s) also continues to be used commonly in the literature.
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