The man who gave Alzheimer’s its name
July 15, 1910
Alzheimer’s disease was given its name long ago, but the keenest minds still struggle to understand it.
It was on July 15, 1910, that the disease Aloysius Alzheimer and Emil Kraepelin were working on was named by Kraepelin, who gave it his colleague’s moniker.
Kraepelin, son of an opera singer and music teacher, was born in the German town of Neusterlitz in 1856 and began his medical studies in his teens.
He would become so good at his work that much of what he found is still relied upon today.
In his own time, however, the man everyone listened to regarding matters of the mind was Austrian neurologist, Sigmund Freud.
While much of what Freud came up with is no longer relied upon, Alzheimer’s is very much in the news as an ongoing issue, and we have only come as far as we have in treating it because of Emil Kraepelin.
Sadly, of course, it is a chronic condition and still not understood completely.
It’s thought as much as 70% of the risk is inherited from parents, with head injuries, depression and high blood pressure also often involved.
Kraepelin believed that a certain brain problem lay behind all major psychiatric disorders, and he always thought that we will one day
get to the bottom of them all.
Much of his related work isn’t nearly as well-known as Alzheimer’s, but he made breakthroughs in everything from schizophrenia to manic depression.
Today, though, compared to someone like Freud, the world of psychiatry depends on his work far more than it did during his lifetime.
Especially in the United States, where many experts rely on his findings.
Alzheimer’s is one of the things that keeps these people very busy indeed. In recent years, there was an estimated 30 million people with the condition worldwide.
It usually starts in people who are over the age 65, although about one in 20 cases begin at a much younger age.
More than two million people died of Alzheimer’s in 2015, more than a century after it was given its name.
Mood swings, neglecting to look after oneself, behaving oddly, lacking any kind of motivation, memory problems and being a bit disorientated are all among its many distressing symptoms.
Often, in its earliest stages, people who know the sufferer mistakenly assume they are just suffering with stress or merely “getting old”.
It can take several years after this stage before someone deteriorates so badly that they receive an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
Without the incredible work of Emil Kraepelin and Aloysius Alzheimer, we might not even understand what little we do.