by Dr Steve McCabe
Alois Alzheimer was a German psychiatrist of little distinction in his own lifetime, working in the ‘mental asylums’ of Frankfurt then Munich. In 1901 he picked up the case of a German lady who, at 51 years old, had developed dementia. He followed her case until her death in 1906 and when she died he carried out a postmortem study of her brain. He and his colleagues identified the presence of abnormal protein plaques and tangles in the brain which he postulated was the cause of the premature dementia