4 - The First Patient with Alzheimer’s Disease

Summary

Recently, I came across an interesting paper from 2013 in Lancet Neurology that adds important genetic information about the case of Auguste D, the first patient diagnosed with what was later called Alzheimer’s disease. She first came under the care of Dr. Alois Alzheimer at age 51 because of rapidly progressive memory loss, hallucinations, seizures, focal neurological signs including trouble speaking, and delusions that her husband was having an affair with the next-door neighbor, fears that were apparently unfounded. She died five years later, and Dr. Alzheimer was able to examine her brain under a microscope. He was surprised to find dark blobs outside of nerve cells and smaller dark tangles within the axons of nerve cells. He reported his findings in 1906 at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tübingen, but there was little interest from the audience. Soon other pathologists started seeing these dark extracellular blobs and intraneuronal twists in the brains of demented patients, later identified as beta-amyloid plaques and tau-containing neurofibrillary tangles. Dementia associated with these characteristic pathological findings came to be called Alzheimer’s disease in his honor.