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Counselor / Addiction

Alzheimer's Disease: Unraveling the Mystery

8.00 - CE credit hours training

$50.00 - Cost of course

This page contains important information about the course, including training details, a comprehensive course description, learning objectives, and source references. We encourage you to review each section to gain a clear understanding of the course content, educational goals, and supporting materials before beginning your training and taking the POST TEST below.

Target audience and instructional level of this course: foundational
There is no known conflict of interest or commercial support related to this CE program.

Alzheimer's Disease: Unraveling the Mystery

Follow the link below, read the material and then take the 20 question post test

Read the Course Material:
Alzheimer's Disease: Unraveling the Mystery

20 Questions

1. Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia among older people. Recent estimates of how many people in the United States currently have Alzheimer's Disease differ, with numbers ranging from 2.4 million to 4.5 million, depending on how Alzheimer's is measured.
2. Alzheimer's disease not only affects the patients but also the caregivers and their needs can be expected to rise rapidly as the population ages and as the number of people with Alzheimer's disease grows.
3. During their years of Alzheimer's disease care giving, spouses, relatives, and friends experience great emotional, physical, and financial challenges. As the disease runs its course and the abilities of people with Alzheimer's disease steadily decline, family members face difficult, and often costly, decisions about the long-term care of their loved ones.
4. The brain has lesser glial cells than neurons and scientists estimate that there are 10 times lesser glial cells than neurons.
5. Scientists now think that the two hemispheres differ not so much in what they do (the "logical versus artistic" notion), but in how they process information. The left hemisphere focuses on detail where as the right hemisphere focuses on the broader background.
6. The hippocampus located at the top of the brain stem, receives sensory and limbic information, processes it and then sends it to the cerebral cortex.
7. Alzheimer's disease disrupts critical metabolic processes that keep neurons healthy. These disruptions cause nerve cells in the brain to stop working, lose connections with other nerve cells, and finally die. The destruction and death of nerve cells causes the memory failure, personality changes, problems in carrying out daily activities, and other features of the disease.
8. Scientists now know that some people develop some plaques in their brain tissue as they age. However, the Alzheimer's brain has many more plaques in particular brain regions. Scientists still do not know whether amyloid plaques themselves cause Alzheimer's disease or whether they are a by-product of the Alzheimer's process.
9. Symptoms of Severe Alzheimer's disease (the final stage) include difficulty with language and problems with reading, writing, and working with numbers, difficulty organizing thoughts and thinking logically and inability to learn new things.
10. Slow and careful detective work by scientists has paid off in discoveries of genetic links to the two main types of Alzheimer's. One type is the rare, earlyonset Alzheimer's and some cases of early-onset disease are inherited and are called familial AD (FAD).
11. Neurons survive and function with the help and support of glial cells. Glial cells are responsible for
12. Sophisticated brain-imaging techniques allow scientists to monitor brain function in living people and to see how various parts of the brain are used for different kinds of tasks. During which one of these scans, scan, a small amount of a radioactive substance is attached to a compound, such as glucose, and injected into the bloodstream.
13. The human brain is made up of billions of neurons. Each has a cell body, an axon, and many dendrites. The axon, which is much narrower than the width of a human hair, extends out from the cell body. Axons transmit messages from
14. As a person grows older, changes in the brain are noticed. One of these changes is:
15. The third major feature of Alzheimer's Disease is the
16. One of the early signs of Alzheimer's disease is
17. The most frequent cause of death for people with AD is
18. Researchers have found that a number of devastating neurodegenerative diseases (for example, AD, Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, front temporal lobar degeneration, Huntington's disease, and prion diseases) share a key characteristic -- that is
19. Lifestyle factors can influence cognitive functions when a person grows old. These lifestyle factors include
20. The important things people should consider before joining a clinical trial for Alzheimer's disease are:
Course Description

This course is aimed at health-care professionals wishing to deepen their knowledge of Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's is a type of dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. Symptoms eventually grow severe enough to interfere with daily tasks. Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia, a general term for memory loss and other cognitive abilities serious enough to interfere with daily life. Although intrinsically linked to old age, Alzheimer's is not a normal part of aging. However, our aging society does make AD an especially critical issue. The 80 and older age group is now the fastest growing segment of the population, and this is particularly relevant when discussing neurodegenerative diseases like AD because the number of people with the disease doubles for every 5-year age interval beyond age 65.

This course describes the main areas in which researchers are working, and highlights new approaches for helping families and friends care for people affected by AD.

Alzheimer's Disease: Unraveling the Mystery

National Institute on Health

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Learning Objectives

After completing this training the health care professional will be able to:

  • Describe long-term care issues pertaining to the aging population.
  • Describe alternative arrangements for the elderly.
  • Identify mental health issues to which the elderly population is vulnerable.
  • Identify alzheimer's stages, activities of daily living, cognitive and emotional changes
  • Assess the treatment strategy currently being used by physicians for patients with Alzheimer's disease.
  • Apply knowledge from this course to practice and/or other professional contexts.
Anne Brown Rodgers, Ph.D.
University of North Carolina
Published by National Institute on Aging, National Institute on Health