How do the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease progress?

This whole idea of what some people refer to as executive function which means your ability to look at a situation, size up what you need to do, carry out those steps in that process and do it, that goes away. Calculations go away. Somebody who had been really good at managing checkbooks and those sorts of things and they just either lose, say they lose interest in it, don’t want to do it anymore or actually can’t do it. Then, the thing, I think, that’s most disturbing to family members in particular, changes in personality and mood.

If you look back over the whole set of things that can occur, you have loss of memory almost always, language skills, word finding, ability to do procedural things that you've always done and changes in mood and personality. Those are the characteristic things but they can be so subtle that sometimes, family members will give them enough help that you don’t know it for a while. You've assisted them enough. You've cued them enough that they’re able to do it for a while. Then, sometimes, it looks like all of a sudden, they can’t do it as well when actually, if you look back, it was a slow progressive process.