What in the world is Alzheimer's?

On November 3, 1906, German physician Dr Alois Alzheimer presented "A peculiar disease process of the cerebral cortex" to the 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tubingen, which would later become known as the Alzheimer's disease, one of the most important diseases in the twentieth century ("The discovery of Alzheimer's disease", 2003). In this presentation, he described the case of a 51-year-old woman, Auguste Deter, who developed progressive dementia, and had begun to develop psychiatric symptoms in memory loss, accompanied by hallucinations and delusions (Ballenger, 2006).