You mean a person can get Alzheimer's before he becomes a senior citizen?
Yes. While the majority of people with Alzheimer's develop the disease at age 65 or older, it can strike people in their 30s, 40s and 50s. In fact, when the German doctor Alois Alzheimer first described the illness in 1906, he was documenting the symptoms of a woman in her early 50s. For much of this century, experts believed that the illness Alzheimer describedknown as both Alzheimer's disease and presenile dementia, because it affected relatively young individualswas different from the illness that affected primarily older individuals. Experts now believe, however, that the two diseases are the same. In other words, Alzheimer's is Alzheimer's no matter when its symptoms begin.
You may still hear the generic terms senile dementia and presenile dementia used in conjunction with Alzheimer's disease and other illnesses that cause dementia, however. They simply indicate the general age of the person experiencing dementia symptoms.
While we're at this defining moment of our discussion, are there any other terms for dementia?