- Those strange disease spies
- The weirdest ways to find her
- look into my eyes
- From nose to mouth
- Beware of small signs
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One of the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s , in some cases, is the difficulty in paying the bills. But there is not only this.
Small forgetfulness, some carelessness, the words that remain on the tip of the tongue and then, that strange new mania of counting and recounting money. In the elderly, it is often trivial symptoms like these that should make us suspect that something is wrong.
It happens to everyone sooner or later to go through a period in which one is more distracted and careless than usual. Stress or fatigue generally also explain well the forgetfulness and the most bizarre behaviors such as leaving the keys in the refrigerator or bread in the bathroom.
Minimizing and waiting for it to pass is not always the best solution, especially if you are a little ahead in the years.
Behind these small daily incidents, in fact, other types of problems could be hidden, such as depression , which can be solved but only if diagnosed and treated with the appropriate therapy. And there is also the possibility that it is a more serious disease like Alzheimer’s.
It is a degenerative brain disease characterized by a progressive decay of cognitive functions and memory in particular. This leads to an increasing difficulty in carrying out common daily activities, up to the complete loss of personal autonomy.
A cure that can solve or stop the problem does not currently exist. However, early diagnosis and timely initiation of symptom-targeted treatments can at least slow down their progression.
According to the U.S. Alzheimer’s Association, there are ten symptoms to watch out for:
| Symptom | Demonstration |
| Anterograde amnesia | Forgetfulness and memory problems especially for the most recent events |
| Apraxia | Difficulty performing known tasks such as tying shoes or buttoning that are not related to physical disabilities |
| Agnosia | Difficulty in recognizing commonly used objects and their functions |
| Anomy | Difficulty in giving a name to common things which are however recognized |
| Spatial disorientation | Confusing familiar places |
| Temporal disorientation | Getting the month, season or year wrong |
| Acalculia | Difficulty in performing relatively simple logical or mathematical operations that may involve, for example, having to count and recount money |
| Lose items | Tendency to constantly lose things by forgetting them in the strangest places (keys in the refrigerator, kitchen linen) |
| Changes in mood or personality | Tendency to become confused, suspicious, depressed, fearful, anxious, upset |
| Apathy | Loss of initiative and interest in oneself, others and the environment in general |
Those strange disease spies
Counting and recounting money is a rather peculiar symptom. Alzheimer’s usually begins subtly with memory problems that become more and more frequent and severe. Forgotten appointments, names of objects that don’t come to mind, amnesia about dates or addresses.
And in a certain sense, even counting and recounting money can depend on a memory problem: if you are distracted while you are doing an action such as paying or giving money to someone, it can happen that you find yourself fiddling with coins. waiting to remember what you were about to do.
It also happens to healthy people, but in patients with Alzheimer’s it can become a particularly frequent phenomenon and not always explainable by obvious interruptions.
However, there are also other typical Alzheimer’s dysfunctions that can explain this symptom.
They have difficult names, but they lead back to common actions: agnosia, that is the inability to recognize common things, acalculia for which it is no longer able to perform elementary mathematical operations or apraxia which is instead an inability to perform gestures normal such as handling money in this case.
If you have a tendency to count and recount money or you notice it in a family member, it is not necessary to be frightened: stress or fatigue can explain this symptom just as well.
However, when in doubt, it is always better to bring this symptom to the attention of a doctor as well.
The weirdest ways to find her
Distinguishing Alzheimer’s from normal aging on the basis of one or more symptoms alone is not easy even for experts.
The exact causes of the disease are not known, and the only elements that could help are anatomical brain lesions that are only found with invasive tests such as biopsy or post-death autopsy.
For these reasons, much of the research on Alzheimer’s is aimed at finding a feature that is both disease-specific and detectable with a simple and non-invasive clinical examination.
The results are not lacking, even if some of the diagnostic systems found so far are rather bizarre.
look into my eyes
For example, according to the Americans Huntington Potter and Leonard Scinto, respectively a neurologist and an ophthalmologist, a drop of eye drops would be enough to understand if a person has Alzheimer’s.
In fact, those suffering from this pathology show a clear decrease in the brain of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and of neurons that use it and that are involved in the control of the pupil.
According to what was found by the two scholars, a drop of eye drops containing tropicamide (a substance that blocks acetylcholine) causes dilation of the pupil even in healthy people, but in the patient the action is much more marked because the drug deactivates the little acetylcholine left for counteract the enlargement of the pupil.
The discovery is as revolutionary as it is simple and opens up new hope for scientific research in this field.
Another group of American researchers is also hoping to be able to diagnose Alzheimer’s simply by looking patients in the eye.
This time, however, looking not for an alteration of the pupil diameter, but for some inclusions in the vitreous body due to deposits of the same proteins that accumulate in the brain.
From nose to mouth
It is not the first time that scholars have attempted the path of the sense organs to diagnose Alzheimer’s.
In 2004, Devangere Devanand and colleagues at Columbia University presented a new type of test that was supposed to make it possible to diagnose pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease simply by having patients at risk sniff a series of ten fragrances.
In fact, the researchers realized that among the individuals at higher risk for Alzheimer’s because for example they had a family history, those with olfactory defects almost certainly developed the disease.
The presence of an olfactory deficit should therefore have represented a good predictive signal to identify people who would develop this type of senile dementia over time.
The near future could offer interesting diagnostic tools for taste as well.
A group of Washington University researchers led by Katherine Piwnica-Worms has discovered a correlation between difficulty in recognizing the meaning of words and defects in identifying food tastes.
By studying people with semantic dementia, a particular type of dementia characterized by a loss of the ability to grasp the meaning of words, the team found that often those with this disease develop a notable gluttony associated with a preference for unusual foods or unusual combinations of flavors.
According to scholars this behavior would depend on a loss of the meaning of flavors. And, in fact, they have managed to demonstrate that these people are perfectly capable of discriminating different flavors and to indicate whether they find certain combinations pleasant or not, but they have considerable difficulties in identifying individual flavors or in appropriately evaluating particular tastes, such as vanilla or pickle.
It is the first direct evidence that the meaning of flavors, like that of other things in the world, is affected by this particular form of dementia. But it is not excluded that it may also represent a new possibility to diagnose and distinguish various neurodegnerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, at an early stage, starting from the simple analysis of people’s food tastes.
Beware of small signs
Unfortunately none of these non-invasive methods has proved so infallible and to date only the careful clinical and neurological evaluation of cognitive and behavioral symptoms and their tendency to worsen over time, allows us to arrive at a clinical diagnosis.
If done correctly and above all promptly, it allows you to start that series of pharmacological treatments and behavioral therapies which, if not curative, can maintain a good quality of life for those affected and their families for a long time.
The time factor is therefore fundamental and that is why doctors try to sensitize the population to the alarm bells that could make them suspect the existence of a problem of this type, including counting money
