Building the brain…
You were part way through.
A visual explainer
Travel from the whole brain down to a single nerve cell, and back out again, to see how the disease unfolds.
Around 982,000 people in the UK live with dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease causes roughly six in ten of those cases. One in three people born today will develop dementia in their lifetime.
01 · A healthy brain
Nerve cells, or neurons, pass messages to each other as tiny electrical and chemical signals. Every thought, memory and movement depends on these connections.
02 · Plaques
Fragments of a protein called amyloid collect in the spaces between neurons. Gradually they stick together into clumps known as plaques.
03 · Tangles
Inside a neuron, tau normally helps hold its internal transport tracks together. In Alzheimer's, tau changes shape, comes away from the tracks and twists into tangles.
Plaques and tangles develop alongside each other, over many years.
04 · Communication
Signals grow weaker and less frequent. One by one, the connections between cells are lost.
Plaques and tangles do not always mean dementia. Some people have them and never develop symptoms.
“I’d forget the simplest of words, or the names of people I’d worked with forever.”
Wendy Mitchell, diagnosed with young-onset Alzheimer’s at 58, speaking to Age UK
05 · Cell loss
As neurons are lost, the affected regions of the brain gradually shrink. Areas involved in memory are often affected first.
06 · Everyday life
A recent conversation slips away. A familiar routine becomes confusing. Words that were always there are suddenly out of reach.
“I’m Andy’s carer now – but I’m also still his partner.”
Christine, whose partner Andy has young-onset dementia, speaking to Dementia UK
These changes build up over many years, and what first sets them in motion is still not fully understood.
07 · What can be done
New treatments can clear amyloid from the brain and modestly slow early decline. Blood tests are making diagnosis earlier and simpler. Neither is a cure, and neither suits everyone.
“I like to think of a diagnosis as the beginning of a different life.”
Wendy Mitchell, dementia campaigner and author, speaking to Age UK
Some of what raises the risk can be changed. Hearing loss, high blood pressure, smoking, inactivity and isolation all play a part.
Source: NHS
The written version
Some things that affect dementia risk can be changed. Tick anything you recognise: the list is a prompt for a conversation with a GP, not a score, and no single item decides anything.
Ticks stay in this browser and are never sent anywhere. Several of these are easier to change than they look. Source: NHS.
Every scene is drawn from scratch in the browser rather than from scan data, so it is an illustration of the biology, not a measurement of it. The things worth knowing: