Alzheimer’s Disease: When Memory Begins to Fade, What Remains of the Self?

 

A Medical and Philosophical Exploration of Memory, Identity, Human Dignity, and the Meaning of Care

There are few things as deeply connected to our sense of identity as memory. The places we have lived, the people we have loved, the mistakes we regret, the lessons we have learned, and the ordinary moments we rarely think about all contribute to the story we call our life. Memory gives these experiences continuity. It allows us to recognize our past as our own and imagine a future that belongs to us.

But what happens when that continuity begins to weaken?

What happens when a person who once remembered every detail of family life begins to forget familiar names, familiar places, and eventually the faces of people who have loved them for decades? What happens when the mind that once organized an entire household can no longer remember why it entered a room?

These questions lead us beyond medicine and into philosophy, psychology, and the very meaning of being human.

Alzheimer’s disease is one of the most recognized causes of dementia, a progressive neurological condition that affects memory, thinking, language, behavior, and the ability to perform everyday activities. Yet describing Alzheimer’s only through its symptoms and biological mechanisms leaves an important part of the story untold.

Behind every diagnosis is a human life. Behind every forgotten name is a relationship. And behind every clinical observation is a person whose worth cannot be measured by the accuracy of their memory.

To understand Alzheimer’s disease properly, we must examine both what happens inside the brain and what the disease reveals about the fragile relationship between memory, identity, and human connection.

1. Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease: More Than Forgetfulness

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive brain disorder that gradually damages the neural systems responsible for memory, learning, language, reasoning, and other cognitive functions. It is the most common cause of dementia, although dementia itself is an umbrella term for several conditions that interfere with cognitive functioning and everyday life.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about Alzheimer’s disease is that it represents an inevitable consequence of growing old. It does not. Although age is the strongest known risk factor, Alzheimer’s disease is not a normal part of aging, and significant cognitive decline should never be dismissed simply because someone is older.

Occasionally forgetting where we placed our keys or struggling to recall a name does not automatically indicate a neurological disease. Human memory is imperfect, and attention, stress, sleep, medication, and other health conditions can influence how well we remember things.

The distinction becomes more important when memory problems persist, worsen, or begin interfering with ordinary life.

A person may repeatedly ask the same question, become lost in a familiar neighborhood, struggle to manage previously familiar tasks, or experience increasing difficulty following conversations. Changes in judgment, language, mood, and personality may also occur.

The defining concern is not a single forgotten detail. It is a progressive pattern of cognitive difficulties that affects independence and daily functioning.

Alzheimer’s disease usually develops gradually. Its course varies between individuals, and the symptoms experienced by one person may differ considerably from those experienced by another.

This variability reminds us that a diagnosis can describe a disease without fully predicting the individual experience of living with it.

2. The Biology of a Mind Under Pressure

To understand the philosophical consequences of Alzheimer’s disease, we must first understand something about its biology.

The human brain is not a passive storage device containing neatly organized files. It is a living network of neurons communicating through complex electrical and chemical processes. Memories emerge from changes in these networks, involving the formation, strengthening, and reorganization of connections between nerve cells.

Remembering a childhood home, recognizing a familiar voice, or recalling a conversation depends on distributed systems working together. Memory is not located in a single place, nor does every kind of memory depend on precisely the same neural mechanisms.

In Alzheimer’s disease, abnormal accumulation of beta-amyloid protein and changes involving tau protein are important features of the disease process. These abnormalities are associated with disruption of neuronal communication, damage to synapses, inflammation, and the eventual loss of neurons in affected brain regions.

The hippocampus, a structure essential for forming many new memories, is particularly vulnerable in the early stages. As the disease progresses, damage can involve wider networks responsible for language, spatial awareness, reasoning, and other cognitive abilities.

These biological changes help explain why a person may remember events from decades ago while struggling to remember a conversation that occurred minutes earlier. Older memories can sometimes remain accessible even when the formation of new memories becomes increasingly difficult, although this pattern is not universal.

The brain does not simply erase an entire life in chronological order. Different abilities change at different rates.

This distinction matters because the visible symptom of forgetting is only one part of a much more complex neurological process.

It also challenges a common assumption: that a person who cannot retrieve a memory has necessarily lost every trace of the experience associated with it. The relationship between conscious recall, emotional response, learned behavior, and recognition is more complicated than that.

Science cannot promise that every meaningful experience remains preserved somewhere in an accessible form. It can, however, help us understand why a person's responses, preferences, and emotional connections may remain meaningful even when verbal recollection becomes unreliable.

3. Memory and Identity: Are We Still Ourselves Without Our Past?

Perhaps the most unsettling question raised by Alzheimer’s disease is not medical but philosophical:

If memory helps make us who we are, what happens to our identity when memory begins to disappear?

Our personal identity develops through a continuous relationship between past and present. We recognize ourselves as the same person who attended school, formed friendships, experienced heartbreak, raised children, or pursued ambitions years ago.

Memory allows us to connect those experiences into a coherent narrative. Without it, the story becomes harder to retrieve, organize, and communicate.

The philosopher John Locke famously connected personal identity with consciousness and the ability to recognize past experiences as one's own. His ideas raise an important question in the context of dementia: if conscious recollection becomes fragmented, does personal identity become fragmented with it?

The question is powerful, but it requires caution.

Human identity cannot be reduced to autobiographical memory alone. We are also embodied beings shaped by temperament, habits, relationships, emotional learning, values, and years of interaction with the world. Some of these dimensions may persist even when other cognitive abilities decline.

A person who no longer remembers the name of a family member may still respond to that person's voice. Someone who cannot explain a lifelong musical preference may still find comfort in a familiar melody. A person who struggles to follow a conversation may continue to respond to warmth, patience, and a reassuring presence.

These responses do not prove that every memory remains intact. Rather, they show why the loss of explicit recollection should not be mistaken for the disappearance of the whole person.

Perhaps the mistake lies in asking whether the person remains exactly as they were.

Alzheimer’s disease changes people. It can alter their abilities, behavior, preferences, and relationships. Pretending otherwise does not respect their experience.

But change is not the same as the destruction of human worth.

The person may no longer be able to tell the story of their life as they once did. That does not mean the life itself has become meaningless.

Their history still exists in the world. It lives in family photographs, the people they influenced, the work they completed, the kindness they offered, and the memories carried by those who knew them.

The individual is more than their capacity to narrate their own biography.

And perhaps this is one of the most important lessons Alzheimer’s disease can teach us: a person's value does not disappear when their ability to explain who they are begins to fade.

4. The Difference Between Remembering Someone and Knowing Them

Modern life often treats memory as evidence of connection.

We ask people to remember birthdays, recognize faces, recall conversations, and demonstrate affection through words. When these abilities disappear, we may begin to question whether the relationship itself still exists.

Alzheimer’s disease exposes the limitations of this assumption.

Consider an older woman who no longer recognizes her adult son consistently. He may visit her and hear her ask who he is. For him, the moment may be devastating. He remembers childhood conversations, family celebrations, difficult years, and the many small sacrifices that shaped their relationship.

She may not be able to retrieve those shared experiences.

Yet the emotional significance of their relationship cannot be judged solely by whether she can identify him correctly.

Recognition and emotional connection are related, but they are not identical. Cognitive impairment can disrupt the ability to identify people or explain why they matter, while some emotional responses and familiar patterns of interaction may remain.

This creates a difficult situation for families. They may find themselves grieving the loss of a relationship that is still physically present but no longer functions in the way they recognize.

The challenge is to acknowledge that grief without assuming that the person with Alzheimer’s has become an empty version of their former self.

There is a temptation to test memory repeatedly: asking the person to name relatives, remember an event, or prove recognition. Such questions may come from love and longing rather than cruelty. Families naturally want evidence that their shared history remains accessible.

But repeated testing can create frustration and distress without restoring what has been lost.

Sometimes, the more compassionate response is to introduce oneself gently, share a familiar activity, listen without demanding perfect recall, or simply sit together without turning the visit into an examination.

Love does not always require recognition to be demonstrated on demand.

Sometimes it requires accepting that the relationship has changed and learning how to meet the person where they are now.

5. The Emotional World of a Person Living With Alzheimer’s

A discussion of Alzheimer’s disease can become unintentionally dehumanizing when it focuses entirely on cognitive decline.

Clinical language describes impairment, progression, and loss of function. These descriptions are necessary for diagnosis and treatment, but they do not fully capture the lived experience of the person receiving care.

During earlier stages, some individuals are aware of their difficulties. They may notice that conversations are becoming harder to follow, that familiar tasks require more effort, or that their independence is changing.

This awareness can bring anxiety, embarrassment, sadness, anger, or uncertainty about the future.

Imagine knowing that something important is changing inside your mind while finding it increasingly difficult to explain precisely what is happening. Imagine needing assistance with tasks that once required no thought at all, while struggling to communicate why the assistance feels uncomfortable.

Such experiences deserve patience rather than judgment.

As the disease progresses, a person's ability to describe emotions may become limited. Changes in behavior can sometimes communicate discomfort, fear, confusion, pain, fatigue, or an unmet need.

For this reason, caregivers should avoid assuming that difficult behavior is deliberate or that an individual is simply being uncooperative. A sudden change in behavior can also indicate a medical problem, including delirium, infection, medication effects, or pain, and warrants appropriate clinical assessment.

The person's emotional experience may not always be easy to interpret, but uncertainty is not a justification for ignoring it.

A calm voice, a predictable routine, a familiar environment, and respectful explanations can help reduce unnecessary distress. The goal is not to force the person to behave as they did before the illness. It is to create conditions in which they can feel as safe, comfortable, and involved as possible.

The central principle is simple: cognitive impairment does not remove the need for emotional respect.

6. The Family’s Grief: Losing Someone Who Is Still Here

Alzheimer’s disease affects more than the person whose brain is changing. It transforms the lives of partners, children, siblings, and friends who must learn to relate to someone whose abilities and personality may gradually change.

Families sometimes experience what is known as ambiguous loss: a form of grief in which a loved one remains physically present, but aspects of the relationship that once defined everyday life become difficult or impossible to recover.

A spouse may still share a home with their partner while losing the conversations and mutual understanding that once sustained their marriage. An adult child may become responsible for decisions previously made by a parent. A family may continue celebrating birthdays while recognizing that the person at the center of the celebration experiences the event differently.

These losses can be difficult to explain because there is no single moment at which the relationship changes completely.

Instead, families may encounter many small adjustments, each requiring a new understanding of what the person can do, what they need, and how they experience the world.

Caregivers may feel sadness, guilt, exhaustion, frustration, or even relief when support becomes available. These emotions can coexist. Feeling overwhelmed does not mean someone lacks love, just as needing rest does not mean someone has abandoned their responsibilities.

Caregiving is not sustained by affection alone. It requires time, knowledge, practical resources, emotional support, and opportunities for rest.

Families should seek help from healthcare professionals, community services, and trusted support networks when possible. Sharing responsibilities and arranging respite care can protect both the caregiver's well-being and the quality of care provided.

There is also an important ethical consideration: caregivers have needs and limits, but the person receiving care retains dignity, preferences, and rights.

Good care must make room for both realities.

The family should not be expected to become a limitless source of patience, and the person with Alzheimer’s should not be treated as a burden whose needs no longer deserve attention.

Compassion becomes sustainable when responsibility is shared rather than silently imposed on one exhausted individual.

7. Diagnosis: Recognizing the Disease Without Reducing the Person to It

An Alzheimer’s diagnosis can be frightening, but an accurate assessment is important.

Memory problems have many possible causes. Depression, sleep disorders, medication effects, vitamin deficiencies, thyroid disorders, infections, and other neurological conditions may contribute to cognitive symptoms. Some causes are treatable, which is one reason persistent changes should receive medical evaluation rather than being automatically attributed to Alzheimer’s disease.

Clinical assessment may include a medical history, discussion with the individual and someone familiar with their daily functioning, cognitive testing, physical and neurological examinations, laboratory investigations, and brain imaging when indicated.

In selected circumstances, clinicians may use specialized biomarkers, including certain blood tests, cerebrospinal fluid tests, or amyloid-related imaging, to help clarify whether Alzheimer’s-related brain changes are present. The choice depends on the clinical situation, local availability, and the purpose of testing.

No single memory complaint or screening score should be interpreted in isolation.

An early diagnosis can help individuals and families understand what is happening, plan for future care, address safety concerns, and explore treatment options while the person can still participate meaningfully in decisions.

Planning ahead is not an admission of defeat. It is a way of preserving autonomy for as long as possible.

Discussions about future care preferences, financial arrangements, trusted decision-makers, and living circumstances can be difficult, but they are important. They allow a person to communicate what matters to them before communication and decision-making become more challenging.

The purpose of diagnosis is not to replace someone's identity with a medical label.

It is to provide information that supports better decisions, appropriate treatment, and a more informed response to the person's needs.

8. Treatment: What Medicine Can and Cannot Do

At present, Alzheimer’s disease has no universally effective cure that restores all lost cognitive abilities. Nevertheless, this does not mean that treatment is pointless or that nothing can be done.

Management depends on the stage of disease, the person's health, symptoms, preferences, and available therapies.

Some medications, including cholinesterase inhibitors and memantine, may help manage symptoms in appropriate patients. They do not cure the disease, and their benefits and risks should be discussed with a qualified healthcare professional.

In some countries, disease-modifying treatments targeting amyloid, including lecanemab and donanemab, are available for carefully selected people with early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease. These treatments can slow the rate of decline in eligible patients, but they do not reverse established damage or stop the disease completely. They also involve important risks, including amyloid-related imaging abnormalities, which can involve brain swelling or bleeding and require appropriate monitoring.

Eligibility, regulatory approval, availability, and clinical recommendations vary by country and individual circumstances. Treatment decisions require specialist assessment and a clear discussion of potential benefits, risks, and practical burdens.

Non-drug approaches remain equally important to comprehensive care.

Maintaining physical activity appropriate to the person's abilities, supporting good nutrition and sleep, managing other medical conditions, encouraging meaningful social contact, and adapting the home environment may improve well-being and help preserve daily functioning.

Communication strategies can also make a significant difference. Short, clear sentences, sufficient time to respond, simple choices, and a calm environment may reduce confusion. Rather than correcting every factual mistake, caregivers can often respond to the underlying emotion and redirect the conversation gently when appropriate.

The purpose of treatment should be understood broadly.

It is not simply to extend the time during which a person can perform tasks independently. It is also to support comfort, preserve meaningful abilities where possible, reduce distress, and help individuals and families live as well as they can with the condition.

Hope in medicine does not require promising a cure. Sometimes it means improving the quality of the time that remains.

9. Can Alzheimer’s Disease Be Prevented?

No strategy can guarantee that a person will never develop Alzheimer’s disease. Genetics, age, biology, and other factors influence risk, and some remain beyond individual control.

However, evidence suggests that addressing certain modifiable risk factors may help reduce the risk of dementia or cognitive decline.

These measures include regular physical activity, avoiding tobacco, maintaining a balanced diet, managing blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol, treating hearing and vision problems when possible, staying socially engaged, and seeking appropriate care for sleep and other health conditions.

Reducing the risk of stroke and other forms of vascular injury is particularly important because vascular health and brain health are closely connected.

These actions should not be presented as guarantees. People who exercise regularly, eat well, and remain intellectually active can still develop Alzheimer’s disease. Conversely, a diagnosis should never be treated as evidence that someone failed to take sufficient care of themselves.

Prevention is about improving probabilities, not assigning blame.

This distinction is ethically important. Public health advice should empower people to make informed choices without creating the false impression that every illness can be prevented through individual discipline.

Human biology is not a moral examination, and disease is not proof of personal failure.

10. Alzheimer’s Disease and the Ethics of Human Dignity

As cognitive abilities decline, the way society treats a person can become as important as the treatment they receive.

A person who can no longer manage money independently may still have clear preferences about music, food, clothing, relationships, and daily routines. Someone who struggles to understand complex explanations may still express discomfort, pleasure, refusal, or a desire for companionship.

These expressions deserve attention.

It is easy to confuse the need for assistance with the loss of autonomy altogether. In reality, autonomy can often be supported through adapted communication, meaningful choices, familiar routines, and opportunities to participate in decisions at an appropriate level.

The ethical challenge is to protect a person from harm without unnecessarily taking control of every aspect of their life.

For example, a caregiver may need to simplify a decision without removing all choice. Instead of asking a person to make a complicated series of decisions, they might offer two suitable options. Rather than assuming that a person can no longer participate in a familiar activity, they might adapt it to the individual's current abilities.

These adjustments communicate something essential: the person is still a participant in their own life.

Dignity does not depend on intellectual performance.

If it did, we would have to conclude that human worth rises and falls with memory, reasoning, language, or independence. Such a conclusion would make dignity conditional precisely when people are most vulnerable.

A more humane understanding recognizes that people deserve respect not because they can demonstrate a particular level of cognitive ability, but because they are human beings with histories, relationships, experiences, and needs.

Alzheimer’s disease tests whether we truly believe this principle or merely repeat it when respecting someone is easy.

11. The Meaning of Care When Words Are No Longer Enough

Care is often imagined as a series of tasks: preparing meals, administering medication, assisting with personal hygiene, arranging appointments, and preventing accidents.

These responsibilities are essential, but care is not exhausted by completing them.

Care also involves the manner in which those tasks are performed.

There is a difference between helping someone dress and making them feel ashamed of needing help. There is a difference between guiding someone through a confusing moment and treating their confusion as an inconvenience. There is a difference between speaking about a person and speaking to them.

Small decisions can preserve dignity: knocking before entering a room, explaining what is about to happen, protecting privacy, offering choices, and allowing enough time for a response.

When verbal communication becomes difficult, familiar music, photographs, meaningful objects, gentle conversation, and shared routines may provide opportunities for connection. These approaches should be guided by the person's preferences, because a familiar stimulus that comforts one individual may upset another.

Touch should also be respectful and welcomed rather than assumed to be appropriate.

Not every moment of connection will produce an obvious response. Not every visit will feel successful. Caregivers may sometimes leave feeling uncertain about whether their efforts made a difference.

Yet the absence of a clear response does not make respectful care meaningless.

Care is not a performance that must be rewarded with recognition. It is a commitment to meeting another person's needs without requiring them to prove that they deserve the effort.

This is where medicine encounters one of its most human responsibilities: treating the disease while continuing to recognize the person.

12. What Alzheimer’s Disease Reveals About the Human Condition

Most people spend much of their lives building an identity through achievements, relationships, memories, and plans for the future. We collect experiences and arrange them into stories that explain who we are.

We often assume that this story will remain available to us whenever we wish to tell it.

Alzheimer’s disease challenges that assumption.

It reminds us that the brain is biological, that cognition depends on vulnerable neural systems, and that the abilities we take for granted are not guaranteed to remain unchanged throughout life.

This realization can produce fear. We may imagine that losing memory means losing everything that makes life meaningful.

But perhaps this fear reveals something about the way we define ourselves.

If we believe that a person matters only because they remember their accomplishments, recognize their family, communicate clearly, and remain independent, then our understanding of humanity is dangerously narrow.

A human life contains more than its ability to recall itself.

Consider the relationships we maintain with infants who cannot yet understand their own biographies, or with people who temporarily cannot communicate because of illness. We do not normally conclude that their lives lack meaning simply because their ability to describe themselves is limited.

Why, then, should cognitive decline automatically erase the significance we recognize in an older adult?

The circumstances are different, and the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease are real. Still, the underlying ethical question remains: does dignity depend on the ability to demonstrate it?

The disease also reveals the extent to which identity is relational. Our lives are not formed in isolation. Other people help preserve our stories, interpret our experiences, and remind us of the things we can no longer recall.

When a person's memory becomes unreliable, family members and caregivers may become keepers of shared history. They can preserve photographs, tell stories, maintain traditions, and provide continuity between the person's past and present.

They cannot restore the damaged brain simply by remembering on someone's behalf. Nor should they insist that the person must inhabit a past they can no longer access.

But they can ensure that the person's life is not reduced to a list of lost abilities.

In this sense, care becomes an act of historical and moral recognition. It acknowledges that a person has lived a life of substance, even when that life can no longer be fully narrated by the person who experienced it.

And it asks society to recognize that the value of a life is not exhausted by what its owner can remember.

13. A Final Reflection: When Memory Fades, Love Must Learn a Different Language

Perhaps the deepest tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease is not simply that memories become inaccessible, but that the people who love the individual must learn to live with a changing relationship.

A son may have to introduce himself to his mother in ways he never imagined. A husband may find that the woman with whom he shared decades of life can no longer participate in their familiar conversations. A family may discover that the stories that once connected generations are becoming harder to tell together.

There is no honest way to make these losses painless.

Love cannot reverse neurological damage, and patience cannot guarantee recognition. A familiar song cannot promise the return of a forgotten childhood. Medical care cannot yet restore every ability that Alzheimer’s disease takes away.

Pretending otherwise would be unfair to patients and families.

Yet there is a meaningful distinction between accepting the limits of medicine and surrendering the responsibility to care.

We can continue to speak respectfully when a person struggles to understand. We can offer companionship without demanding a memory in return. We can preserve opportunities for comfort, pleasure, choice, and human connection. We can support caregivers who are exhausted by responsibilities they never expected to carry.

And we can resist the habit of describing people only through what they have lost.

The person living with Alzheimer’s is not merely a disappearing collection of memories. They are someone who has lived, loved, worked, suffered, learned, and contributed to the world in ways that may extend far beyond what they can now recall.

Their biography does not become worthless when its details become difficult to retrieve.

Perhaps, then, the most important question is not whether a person can remember who they are.

Perhaps it is whether the rest of us can remember how to treat them.

A diagnosis can describe what is happening to the brain. It can explain why familiar abilities are changing and help guide decisions about treatment and care. But it cannot determine the full meaning of a human life.

Alzheimer’s disease forces us to confront the limits of memory, the fragility of independence, and the uncomfortable truth that none of us controls every aspect of our future.

It also offers an opportunity to reconsider what we mean by dignity.

If we reserve our deepest respect only for people who can think clearly, speak fluently, remember accurately, and care for themselves, then our compassion has conditions.

If, instead, we continue to recognize the person when those abilities change, we acknowledge something more enduring than memory itself: the principle that human beings deserve care even when they can no longer explain their own worth.

Memory may help us tell the story of a life.

It should never be the only reason that life matters.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Alzheimer’s Disease

What is Alzheimer’s disease?

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurological disorder that damages brain cells and affects memory, thinking, language, behavior, and everyday functioning. It is the most common cause of dementia.

Is Alzheimer’s disease a normal part of aging?

No. Although the risk increases with age, Alzheimer’s disease is not an inevitable consequence of getting older. Persistent or worsening cognitive changes should be evaluated by a healthcare professional.

What are the early warning signs of Alzheimer’s disease?

Possible warning signs include persistent memory difficulties, repeatedly asking the same questions, difficulty completing familiar tasks, confusion about time or place, problems finding words, impaired judgment, and changes in mood or behavior that interfere with daily life.

Can Alzheimer’s disease be cured?

There is currently no cure that restores all lost cognitive abilities. However, available medications and supportive interventions may help manage symptoms, and certain disease-modifying treatments can slow decline in carefully selected people with early symptomatic disease.

Can Alzheimer’s disease be prevented?

No intervention guarantees prevention. However, physical activity, cardiovascular risk management, avoiding tobacco, a balanced diet, social engagement, and treatment of relevant health conditions may help reduce the risk of dementia or cognitive decline.

How should families communicate with someone who has Alzheimer’s disease?

Use calm, respectful communication; allow time for responses; offer simple choices; and avoid turning conversations into repeated memory tests. Responding to the person's emotional needs can be more helpful than insisting on factual correction in every situation.

Does a person with Alzheimer’s disease still need emotional connection?

Yes. Cognitive decline does not eliminate the need for dignity, comfort, meaningful activity, respectful communication, and human companionship. The ways a person experiences and expresses connection may change, so care should be adapted to their individual needs.

Medical Disclaimer

This article is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Memory problems can have several causes, some of which may be treatable. Anyone experiencing persistent or worsening cognitive difficulties should seek assessment from a qualified healthcare professional. Treatment decisions for Alzheimer’s disease should be made in consultation with an appropriately qualified clinician.

References and Further Reading

1. World Health Organization (WHO). Dementia. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia

2. Alzheimer’s Association. Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia. https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia

3. National Institute on Aging. Alzheimer’s Disease. https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/alzheimers-and-dementia

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About the Author

Magdy Abushaker is a licensed registered nurse with an interest in medical education, human health, and the relationship between science and the human experience. His writing aims to make complex medical topics understandable while encouraging readers to approach health, illness, and caregiving with knowledge, critical thinking, and compassion.