The common things that we see in folks with Alzheimer's disease, and remember this can be very subtle, almost always memory loss is a part of it. It’s short term memory usually, forgetting what your wife just told you, forgetting what your husband just told you. That’s really the most common thing that we see but there have to be some other symptoms as well that relate to cognition, for instance, some loss of language skills. Word finding is a very common problem that people have in early Alzheimer's disease. They just can’t remember the word for something. They might be able to describe it. They’ll say, “Well, you know, I need that thing that you hold in your hand and you write with.” “You need a pen?” “Yes, that’s right. I need a pen.”
They may start to forget procedural things like for instance, wife would say, “Well, every Wednesday night, he goes … For years, he’d go around. He’d get all the trash from all the different places in the house, put it in a big black bag, take it out, put in the trash can, next morning, roll the trash can out. Garbage folks would come by and pick it up, did that for years. Now, what happened a year ago is I’d have to say, “Look, tomorrow’s trash day.”” “Oh, yeah. Yeah.” “He’d go around, do all those things and then, after a while, I’d have to kind of follow him around to do those things and then finally, he’d just not remember how to do it correctly or in the right sequence.”
