When I was 14, my grandfather had a stroke and right after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. With this disease, he had to stay in a nursing home because there he would have nurses who would know how to take care of him the right way and how to deal with all of the memory loss and the new way that his brain was functioning. Given that the brain completely modified after the stroke (brain plasticity). He stayed in this same situation for about two years until he passed away. It was a very difficult time period for everyone in our family, but especially to my mom because she would visit him more at the nursing home he stayed at. She experienced a lot of his memory loss and episodes where he wouldn’t know what to do with his body or mind in certain situations because his brain wouldn’t function as it used to.
The brain is one of the most important organs of our body, maybe possibly even the most important. Alzheimer’s is a disease that affects the brain and its various functions. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease that causes a decline in cognitive functions, reducing work skills and social relationships and interfering with one’s behavior and personality. At first, the patient begins to lose his most recent memory. You may even remember events from years ago, but forget that you have just had a meal. My grandfather lost the complete notion of his automatic survival functions that he used to have before the stroke. His brainstem was damaged so badly that he couldn’t even go to the bathroom by himself, a daily and basic survival function.
The stroke that my grandfather had made it possible for his brain to get damaged and lose certain abilities (neuro-psychology). With the evolution of the condition, Alzheimer’s has a great impact on the person’s daily life and affects learning ability, attention, orientation, comprehension, and language. This disease affects both the left (specialized in language) and right (specialized in art, music, recognition of faces and shapes) hemispheres of the brain causing the person’s inability to do some easy day-to-day skills.
Alzheimer’s disease causes nerve cell death and tissue loss throughout the brain. Over time, the brain shrinks a lot, which affects almost all of its functions. This explains why a lot of the brain’s functions are drastically delayed with Alzheimer’s or even a minor stroke. My grandfather’s cerebellum was also mainly affected, where it helps coordinate voluntary movements and balance and it is also involved in learning skills. His limbic system, a part of our brains that is associated with emotions, was slightly damaged as well. Although he could feel fear and irritation, it was very stressful how at some point he couldn’t even express happiness. The function of the cortex was not as injured, but there were some complications involving the motor and sensory cortex area. The motor cortex controls voluntary movements. And the sensory cortex receives information from the skin surface and sense organs.
Even though the brain has various important functions and it controls most of our bodies it can also be easily damaged causing some of these functions to not work as they used to. Unfortunately, Alzheimer’s disease can affect the whole brain and therefore create complications to the whole system making it difficult to do simple daily actions changing out entire behavior.
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