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MFT / LCSW

Alzheimer's: Basics of the Healthy Brain and What Happens

1.75 - CE credit hours training

$10.50 - 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: Basics of the Healthy Brain and What Happens

Follow the link below, read the material and then take the 17 question post test

Read the Course Material:
Alzheimer's: Basics of the Healthy Brain and What Happens

17 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, early-onset 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
*Note: The content for this course is the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2 of the document.

Alzheimer's disease is an irreversible, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills, eventually even the ability to carry out the simplest tasks. In most people with AD, symptoms first appear after age 60. AD is caused by a disease that affects the brain. In the absence of disease, the human brain often can function well into the 10th decade of life. Not so long ago, we were not able to do much for people with AD. Today, that situation is changing. Thousands of scientists, voluntary organizations, and health care professionals are studying AD so that they can find ways to manage, treat, and one day prevent this terrible disease.
This training was developed by National Institute on Drug Abuse?(NIH) to assist clinical professionals in understanding Alzheimer's disease, research on causes, diagnosis, prevention, potential treatments, and caregiver support. This training is in the public domain. CEUnits.com has developed a course based on this public information.
  • Describe long-term care issues pertaining to the aging population.
  • Identify alternative arrangements for the elderly.
  • Respond effectively to mental health issues to which the elderly population is vulnerable.
  • 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