Diagnosis of alzheimer’s disease

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Such as other neurological disorders, alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed by looking at the medical history of a patient and that of his family, through medical observations of his health, and examining the presence of neurological and neuropsychological features as well as the presence of other factors that could cause the disease.

Examining the medical history of the patient should be the foremost step in diagnosis. It should not be skipped unless the patient is unavailable for questioning. Certain essential issues to take into account are the age, sex, occupation of the patient, the time the symptoms began and how long they have lasted.

Neuropsychology refers to the study of the structure and function of the section of the brain that controls psychological processes and behaviours.

Neuropsychological factors can be determined via the use of consistent neuropsychological tests. By consistent, it means these tests have already been conducted on a group of patients.

The results from these tests become a standard by which the patient’s behaviours and the psychological processes within his brain are judged. Examples of such tests are the wechsler adult memory scale (wms) and the wechsler intelligence scale for children (wisc), halstead-reiten neuropsychological battery, the winconsin card sorting test and the benton visual retention test.

Diagnosis can be achieved by employing tools such as computed axial tomography shortened to computed tomography (cat), magnetic resonance imaging (mri) as well as the single photon emission computed tomography (spect), functional magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography (pet) and electroencephalogram (eeg). These tools act, by observing two main issues namely the structure and the functioning of the brain.

Mri and cat are used to inspect the structure of the brain whereas pet and fmri are for checking the functioning of the brain.

Mri and cat also help in exempting symptoms of other forms of dementia. Moreover, they could help in calculating the possibility of the disease progressing to the second stage.  

Electroencephalography (eeg) is the use of electro psychological techniques in measuring brain activation. Electropsychology denotes measuring the electrical or magnetic field that is produced by the nervous system. Another way of measuring brain activation is by employing magneto-encephalography (meg).

A neurological examination is one performed in order to verify the state of the nervous system, that is whether it is damaged or functioning properly. It evaluates the sensory neuron as well as motor responses of which impulses are an essential feature. A neurological examination could either be employed in probing the presence of a disease or in general inspection of the nervous system.

Normally, a neurological examination is performed to detect the presence of lesions in the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system (consists of the nerves and ganglia outside the brain and spinal code) as well as to check for the presence of multiple disorders that could be affecting the patient. The results of the findings are analyzed by the doctor in determining the kind of ailment the patient may be suffering from. 


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