ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: SYMPTOMS
Most doctors think of Alzheimer’s disease as being characterized by abnormalities of cortical function which they call amnesia, aphasia, and agnosia. This is not as complicated as it sounds. The cortex is of course the outer layer of grey cells which lie on the surface of the brain and the three terms refer, respectively, to general memory failure, difficulty in remembering or understanding the names of objects, and failure to recognize people or objects. The symptoms are, however, very much more complicated than this and the disease often progresses along a different path in different individuals, although the later stages of the different courses of the disease tend to resemble each other. For this reason 1 am going to describe the symptoms caused by the malfunction of the three major lobes of the brain — the temporal lobe, the frontal lobe, and the parietal lobe – although there is some overlap in the relationship between structure and function.
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