History of Alzheimer’s Disease

Alois Alzheimer

As I noted in my previous blog post, medical anthropology is the study of health and disease, and how they are influenced by culture and history. I believe that using the information known about the history of certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, treatments can be developed for them.

Alzheimer’s Disease, first identified by Alois Alzheimer, is a neurodegenerative disease, where the neurons in the brain shrink and die. Neurons are important because they transmit information from the brain to different parts of the body. In AD, the neurons are prevented from doing their job, and the body isn’t able to function properly. Alzheimer’s is also very common, with around 6 million Americans suffering from it.

One characteristic of Alzheimer’s is the plaques and/or tangles in the brain. They are clumps of protein that serve as the reason for the neuron shrinkage. There have been many drugs developed that target these clumps, but most of them have failed, and Alzheimer’s patients suffer because of lack of good therapies to treat and cure the disease.

One reason AD’s history is important is because it is incurable and there haven’t been any successful drugs developed. All these drugs, targeting the proteins in the brain, are administered to patients, but ancient treatments that target the mind and the body as a whole. For example, in ancient China, the amount of phlegm and the blood flow were observed, along with the administering of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). TCM is a combination of different herbs, such as Matrine, an alkaloid that comes from the herb Sophora flavescens Aiton. Another example is in ancient India. Ayurvedic scriptures, like “smriti kshaya” and “medha kshaya” were used to assess the symptoms of the different cognitive diseases and outline treatments. Similar to the Chinese, these treatments also involved different herbs, such as Withania somnifera, commonly known as ashwagandha.

These treatments, along with many other ancient medicinal practices, could potentially find a new way to cure Alzheimer’s Disease. The next blog post will be about the treatments of Alzheimer’s Disease from one of the ancient cultures and the useful takeaways from that treatment methodology that can be applied to today’s treatment approach.