Friday 19 December 2014

This neuropatholologist's name was given to the Presenile demantia by the founder of modern psychiatry!!!


Dr. Aloysius "Alois" Alzheimer (German 14 June 1864 – 19 December 1915) was a Bavarian-born German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of "presenile dementia", which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer's disease.

In 1901, Dr. Alzheimer observed a patient at the Frankfurt Asylum named Auguste Deter. The 51-year-old patient had strange behavioral symptoms, including a loss of short-term memory. This patient would become his obsession over the coming years. In April 1906, Mrs Deter died and Alzheimer had the patient records and the brain brought to Munich where he was working at Kraepelin's lab. With two Italian physicians, he used the staining techniques to identify amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.  Read more & watch the video...