Focus on Alzheimer’s disease

  In China, at least tens of millions of families are now plagued by care problems for the disabled elderly, and the number of disabled elderly has reached 9.4 million. Among these disabled elderly, Alzheimer’s patients make up a larger portion, but most people do not pay enough attention to Alzheimer’s disease.  The World Dementia Day just passed has brought people’s attention back to Alzheimer’s, a topic that is not usually focused on. Wang Zhenyao, director of the Department of Social Welfare and Charity Promotion at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, recently revealed at the China-Europe Social Forum that in China, the number of disabled elderly people has reached 9.4 million nationwide, and at least tens of millions of families in China are now troubled by the care of disabled elderly people. And according to the fifth census projections, China’s elderly population will reach 280 million in 2025. By 2040, the number of patients with Alzheimer’s in China will equal the number of Alzheimer’s in the world’s developed countries combined.  However, in China, the attention to Alzheimer’s disease is still far from adequate. Back in the 1990s, the results of a large-scale survey in China showed that 96% of Alzheimer’s patients were cared for by relatives at home, and close to half of the caregivers considered the elderly’s cognitive and behavioral impairments and declining ability to perform daily activities as normal aging.  Alzheimer’s disease is a primary degenerative brain disease that occurs in old age and preaging, with early signs manifesting as recent memory loss. However, there is a difference between physiological amnesia and Alzheimer’s disease: the former is a manifestation of the declining brain function of the elderly, which is the normal performance of the elderly. Such elderly people have memory loss, but their ability to recognize time, place, relationships and their surroundings is not diminished at all. They are not only able to take care of their own lives, but sometimes they can also take care of their family members. In addition, they have seven emotions; the latter is pathological organic brain intelligence decline, such forgetfulness is completely malignant, as the condition worsens, they will gradually lose the ability to take care of themselves, their thinking becomes more and more slow, their speech becomes more and more impoverished, they lack a sense of humor, and they are slow to react.