7 Surprising Early Signs and Symptoms of Alzheimer's Disease

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The average Alzheimer’s patient is not "Still Alice,” the 50-something linguistics expert from last year's Academy Award-winning movie who faces a devastating diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's Disease. The average Alzheimer’s patient is in her late 70s, whose disease comes on more slowly than depicted in that film, says George Perry, Ph.D., dean of the College of Sciences at the University of Texas San Antonio and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Still there are certain people who get early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease; in the U.S., about 200,000 people have it. How can you tell if you’re among them? There can be surprising symptoms that warn of its development—and they don’tall involve memory problems.

Inability to Recognize Sarcasm

“That was a sarcastic remark.” We say this regularly because we can tell when someone is using the wise-guy device of sarcasm. But if you fail to recognize it, or take it very literally and seriously, it may be a sign of atrophy in your brain. (We all miss it from time to time, of course, but if you consistently “don’t get it,” it could be a problem.)

A study by Katherine Rankin, Ph.D., of the University of California/San Francisco found that Alzheimer’s patients and those with Frontotemporal Disease were among those who could not recognize sarcasm in face-to-face encounters. In such diseases, Dr. Perry says, the brain’s posterior hippocampus is affected, which is where short-term memory is stored, and where one would sort out such things as sarcasm.

Depression

If someone has never suffered from clinical depression in the course of their lives but develops it later in life (after age 50), it could be an early sign of Alzheimer’s.

This does not mean if you’re diagnosed with depression in older age that you will develop Alzheimer’s or other cognitive decline, but it does raise the possibility that you might. One study showed that people who suffered from depression after age 50 were three times more likely to develop an Alzheimer's-related disease, Vascular Dementia, than those that did not.

If you are depressed, get treatment sooner rather than later because some researchers speculate that hormones released in the depressed brain may damage certain areas of it, leading to the development of Alzheimer’s or other dementia.

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