Disease
An important criterion of the neuropathological-histological verification of Alzheimer’s disease is the formation of senile plaques. Beta amyloid peptides associated with senile plaques have been found to play a central role in the risk, onset, and progression of Alzheimer's disease as well. Of particular importance is the longer species of beta amyloid known as beta amyloid 42. Elevated levels of beta amyloid, as well as an elevation in the ratio of beta amyloid 42 to the shorter major species of beta amyloid 40, has been identified as important in early events in the pathogenesis of Alzheimer's Disease.
Other factors in Alzheimer's disease verification include pathological neurofibrillaries, tangles, and atrophic brain with hydrocephalus. The formation and the distribution of the pathological neurofibrillaries have a regularity and allows one to determine the stage of the disease. In combination with the occurrence of a great number of plaques, Alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed with high probability. A correlation between the presence of senile plaques and Down Syndrome has also been verified.
Read more about this topic: Senile Plaques
Famous quotes containing the word disease:
“I prithee, daughter, do not make me mad.
I will not trouble thee, my child; farewell:
We’ll no more meet, no more see one another.
But yet thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter—
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I must needs call mine.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“And this disease that was Swann’s love had so multiplied, it was so intimately tied to all of Swann’s habits, to all his acts, to his thoughts, to his health, to his sleep, to his life, even to what he desired for his afterlife, his love was so much a part of him that it could not be extracted from him without destroying him entirely: as is said in surgery, his love was inoperable.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)