Alzheimer’s disease is a group of brain disorders that cause the loss of intellectual and social skills. It is a progressive disease that destroys memory and other important mental functions. Alzheimer’s disease may be present with mild confusion and difficulty in remembering. People are suffering with the disease may even forget important people in their lives and undergo dramatic personality changes.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. In Alzheimer’s disease, the brain cells degenerate and destroy that causes a steady decline in memory and mental function.

Cause and sympotoms

Alzheimer’s disease damages and kills brain cells. Increasing the number of brain cell die, Alzheimer’s lead to brain shrinkage. When observe in microscope these two condition shows :

• Plaques: That are clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid may damage and destroy brain cells, including interfering with cell-to-cell communication.
• Tangles: Brain cells depend on an internal support and transport system to carry nutrients and other essential materials. This system requires a protein called tau.

Stages of Alzheimer’s Disease

Mild

Mild stages identifies with:

• Memory loss
• Word finding and vision issue
• Impaired judgement power
• Its diagnosed in early stage

Moderate

Moderate stages identifies with:

• Damage the area that control reasoning, language and consciousness.
• Patient may not recognise their family member or friends.
• Irritable nature.

Severe

Severe stages identifies with:

• Completely depend on other person.
• Near end of life.
• Organ failure sometimes occur.

Coding Guideline

Alzheimer’s Disease coding is depend on the onset of disease. This can be checked by daily routine, decision making power , language and speech.

Here some ICD-10 codes used for Alzheimer’s disease. These include dementia senile and presenile form but do not include dementia with or without behavioural change, that is coded seperately.

• G30.0  : Alzheimer’s disease early onset
• G30.1  : Alzheimer’s disease late onset
• G30.8  : Other Alzheimer’s disease
• G30.9  : Alzheimer’s disease unspecified

Other manifestation with Alzheimer’s disease are delirium, dementia with or without behavioural disturbance and wandering:

• F05        : Delirium due to known physiological condition
• F02.80   : Dementia in other disease classified elsewhere without                                                         disturbance
• F02.81   : Dementia in other disease classified elsewhere with disturbance
• Z91.83   : Wandering in disease classified elsewhere

Treatment

Treatment only given for manifestation. It will improve symptoms like memory, speech and ability to doing daily routine work. Caregiver knows the reason of onset of disease. So they take care of it.

But there is no other treatment for curing Alzheimer permanently. We can only treat manifestation like delirium, dementia and speech problem.