What is Alzheimer's disease?

Professor Kenneth Kosik defines Alzheimer's disease as a slowly progressing illness that deteriorates the brain and impairs many major cognitive functions.

Alzheimer’s disease affects elders. It affects their cognition. We generally think about Alzheimer’s affecting memory, however, the disease affects more than simply memory, it affects personality, it affects emotions. It’s a slow, insidious process that causes deterioration of the brain in which many cognitive functions become impaired. Now, that is a clinical definition, it is not the most precise definition. The most precise definition, actually, is the histological or pathological definition. And to actually diagnose Alzheimer’s and use that word we need to see senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles under the microscope of the brain tissue.