What do you know about dementia and Alzheimer's disease that you didn't know before?

Research has shown that the brain puts up with a lot of distress before it starts to show symptoms of dementia. In this video, HealthMaker William Mobley, MD, PhD, explains how the decline begins and what the signs are.

Transcript

00:00

It must mean that there's this enormous reserve in the brain that puts up with a lot of craziness,

00:06

misconnections, things that don't work very well, for a long time before whatever reserve, we'll call it,

00:12

is gone.

00:19

I think the thing that surprises me is how long the brain suffers quietly before you start having

00:31

whole networks fall apart and people not being able to remember aspects of recent engagements,

00:38

events, and facts. It must mean that there's this enormous reserve

00:45

in the brain that puts up with a lot of craziness, misconnections, things that don't work very well,

00:51

for a long time before whatever reserve, we'll call it, is gone. And now you're dealing with a system

00:58

in which even subtle changes seem to really compromise its ability to function. If you talk to a room of people who

01:06

care for people with Alzheimer's disease, you'll ask them, do you notice any changes from day to day, or even hour to hour?

01:12

And almost all of them put their hands up. You know, my mental image is it's the light bulb just not

01:19

quite tightly screwed in. And when the wind blows, it flickers, right? So in the normal brain, it's tightly wound.

01:26

It's tightly screwed in. But as a result of loosening of these connections in the brain, there must be a progressive failure rate

01:35

in signal transmission that ultimately turns the light bulb off.