Alzheimer’s disease

The German psychiatrist and neuropathologist Alois Alzheimer was fascinated by the symptoms of Auguste D., a 50-year-old woman admitted to the Frankfurt Psychiatric Hospital in 1901 who suffered from memory disturbances, paranoia and progressive confusion. After her death and autopsy, Alzheimer described histological alterations in her brain that later came to be known as amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles (Figure 1). The case report was published in a psychiatric textbook some years later, and this peculiar and (at the time) seemingly rare illness was later named Alzheimer’s disease.