Vascular Dementi A Case Study

According to Peters (2012), “Alzheimer’s disease is thought to account for between 60 and 70% of all dementias with the second most common type being vascular dementia 10-30%.” Vascular dementia is a disease that mirrors the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. However, vascular dementia is caused by a lack of oxygen that travels to the brain, which in turn results in memory loss. Those who suffer from vascular dementia are usually older individuals. Age is one of the biggest risk factors with vascular dementia. According to Peters (2012), blood pressure, smoking, and alcohol have all played roles in causes of vascular dementia. As most individuals get older, their blood pressure rises, which raises the risk of stroke in the patient and also causes
Hypertension can also evolve from this change in blood pressure, then causing more of a risk for stroke. Smoking has come to be the cause of many different cardiovascular diseases over the past decade. It has also played a role in those that are diagnosed with vascular dementia. Peters (2012) said that nicotine could be a probable cause of restricted blood flow to the brain. It has been observed that those who smoke have a worse attention span. There is a rise in those who have vascular dementia now because the older people who are suffering now are those who lived during a time when everyone smoked. No one knew that the nicotine and tobacco in the cigarettes would have a long term effect on their health in years to come. It was seen that those who smoke have a higher blood pressure than those who did not smoke (Peters 2012). Alcohol has also been seen as something that could increase the risk for vascular dementia. According to Peters (2012), moderate alcohol consumption could increase HDL cholesterol, decrease platelet aggression, and could also reduce incidence of white matter
In order to conduct this study, male Sprague Dawley rats at sixteen months old were used. They were put into normal living conditions with access to plenty of food and water. The rats were then divided into four different groups. According to Zhang, Zheng, Dong, and Wang (2012), “group A was sham operated control animals, group B was focal cerebral ischemia model, group C was vascular dementia model, and group D was vascular dementia model treated with nimodipine.” The rats were then taken into surgery and were “induced using the bilateral middle cerebral artery occlusion-reperfusion method (Zhang, Zheng, Dong, and Wang, 2012).” In this study, the body temperature was to be kept the same. They used a point system to determine what kind of cognitive deficit the rats had. If the score was greater than three, the rats were then selected for inclusion for groups D and C. All other rats in the other groups were given a saline solution on the same schedule. After all appropriate testing, ten rats were deemed excluded from the study, which left fifteen rats in each experimental group. According to Zhang, Zheng, Dong, and Wang (2012), the Morris Water Maze Test was performed after placing the rats into two different subgroups. One group was for the rats that were trained after two months and the other for those that were trained with the test for four months. This test consisted of the rats being