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Gary W. Small, MD; David A. Greenberg, PhD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1988;45(10):945-947.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer first reported "a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex" in 1906.¹ His patient had died at age 55 years after nearly five years of progressive memory loss, language disability, and paranoia. Alzheimer described the neurofibrillary tangles and neuritic plaques that have since remained the anatomical hallmarks of what was originally thought to be a rare presenile dementia. A half century later, autopsy studies revealed that Alzheimer's disease (AD) was also the major cause of dementia in the elderly, accounting for at least half of all cases beginning after age 65. Alzheimer certainly could not foresee that he was describing an illness that today afflicts an estimated 1 to 2 million people in the United States.²

Stedman's Medical Dictionary³ defines a disease entity as having at least two of the following criteria: a recognized etiologic agent, an identifiable group of signs and symptoms, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
From the Departments of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences (Dr Small) and Biomathematics (Dr Greenberg), UCLA School of Medicine, and West Los Angeles Veterans Administration Medical Center (Dr Greenberg).

Footnotes
Accepted for publication March 9, 1988.

Reprint requests to UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, 760 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA 90024 (Dr Small).

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