Alois Alzheimer

Alois Alzheimer

Alois Alzheimer (1864 - 1915) German psychiatrist and neuropathologist, credited with the first known description of presenile dementia, which his famous colleague Emil Kraepelin, would later name as Alzheimer's disease. Franz Nissl, another noted German and neuropathologist, was his close collaborator and friend in many of his research activities. Alzheimer also gave a detail description of the histopathological changes involved in general paralysis of the insane, before the causative organism of syphilis was discovered. Alzheimer's descriptions of histopathology in presenile dementia are unparalleled, and so thorough that even to this day his criteria for diagnosis of Alzheimer's stand valid. Alzhemier's prototype patient for the eponymous disease was a woman named Auguste Deter, who was admitted to the hospital where he worked, and died five years later at the age of 56. Autopsy studies on her brain were responsible for the first detailed description of the changes involved in the disease, particularly the presence of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.