How long can an elderly person live with Alzheimer’s disease?

Elderly people who develop Alzheimer’s disease can survive for 5-10 years. The disease is a neurodegenerative disease that occurs mostly in older people over 60 years of age, with an insidious onset and mainly manifests as progressive intellectual decline and personality changes. In the early stage, the patient may experience a loss of near memory, but the distant memory can be preserved, as shown by the inability to remember what has just happened or what has just been said, and often forgetting the names of acquaintances. Patients may exhibit cognitive dysfunction in the advanced stages of the disease, showing a significant decrease in the ability to acquire new knowledge, proficiency and social skills. There may also be temporal orientation and spatial orientation disorders, which manifest as confusion about one’s familiar environment, gradual disorientation, and sometimes in one’s own home, the inability to successfully reach the location one wants to go to. Patients in the advanced stage experience complete loss of judgment and cognition. Patients may experience hallucinations, fantasies, engage in complex and bizarre behaviors, accuse their spouse for no apparent reason, think visitors are burglars, and be frightened by images in the mirror.