Objections+to+Findings+Theories+and+Pathologies

Hallmark Plaques and Tangles Previously Documented Dr. Alois Alzheimer was not the first to document or discover the unusual and characteristic plaques and tangles associated with dementia. As early as 1882 descriptions of distortions in the cerebral cortex were mentioned by Paul Blocq and Georges Marinesco of Paris in reference to an elderly patient with epilepsy, they described ‘‘plaques sclereuses de nevroglie’'. Another reference by Redlich in 1898 of ‘‘miliare Sklerose’’ (miliary sclerosis) was used to describe findings in the brain tissue of two dementia patients. Shortly after, Oskar Fisher also described neuritic plaques as features of senile dementia (Cipriani, et al, 2011). It is speculated that German psychiatrist Emil Kraeplin dubbed the conditon Alzheimer's Disease, in his eighth edition of //Psychiatre,// as a form of competition with the research findings of Arnold Pick in Prague and a means of acquiring prestige for his clinic.

 Mental Illness or Organic Disease? Emil Kraepelin's thorough categorization of mental disorders, first published in 1883, was accepted the world over and is seen as the precursor for The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) currently used today. Kraepelin's publication of mental disorders was highly opposed by some of psychology's most prominent figures. Freud did not agree with Kraepelin's organic basis for mental illness as he felt all mental illness was a form of neuroses of the mind. It is also speculated that Kraepelin's categorization of Alzheimer's Disease was a direct challenge to the psychoanalytic theories of Freud (Cipriani, et al, 2011). Understanding and Recognizing Alzheimer's Diseaese Alzheimer's disease went unresearched for decades due, possibly, to existing theories of dementia being an unavoidable result of aging and the lack of documented cases of the same condition in younger individuals. From the reported findings of Alzheimer in 1906, Alzheimer's Disease went virtually unrecognized and undiagnosed by psychiatrists and the medical profession. It was considered to be a rare occurance in very young individuals and senile dementia was considered an expected occurence in the very old due to arteriosclerosis or hardening of the arteries in the brain (Toledo, 2006).