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50 free Alzheimer's Disease trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Alzheimer's disease trivia quiz covers the neurodegenerative illness behind most cases of dementia and one of the largest health challenges of an ageing world. The easy questions cover the German doctor it is named after, the part of the brain it attacks first, the share of dementia it causes, whether it can be cured and the president who announced his diagnosis in a handwritten letter. From there the quiz moves through the science: amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the APOE4 allele, the three genes behind familial early-onset disease, why almost everyone with Down syndrome develops it, the cholinergic hypothesis, the four cholinesterase inhibitors and the antibody drugs. The hard end covers the history and the epidemiology: Auguste Deter in the Frankfurt asylum and the phrase she kept repeating, the deal Alzheimer struck for her brain, Kraepelin's textbook of 1910, the 1977 conference that merged presenile and senile dementia, the Yoruba exception, the Osaka mutation, the eight-year lead of neuropsychological testing, the doubling of risk every five years, the trillion-dollar annual cost and the 152 million cases projected for 2050. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for Alzheimer's disease, Alois Alzheimer, Auguste Deter and Ronald Reagan before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our human brain, medicine and human body quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Roughly what share of dementia cases does Alzheimer's disease account for?
60 to 70 percent
That makes it by far the most common cause of dementia.
Q 02After whom is Alzheimer's disease named?
A German psychiatrist and pathologist
Alois Alzheimer first reported the case publicly in 1906.
Q 03Which region of the brain, associated with memory, does the disease target first?
The hippocampus
That is why the first symptoms are usually problems with learning and memory.
Q 04What two kinds of malformed protein deposit characterise the disease in the cerebral cortex?
Amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles
Amyloid beta builds up outside cells and tau protein inside them.
Q 05Which protein forms the neurofibrillary tangles inside neurons?
Tau
The tau hypothesis and the amyloid hypothesis are the two leading explanations of the disease's origin.
Q 06Is there a cure for Alzheimer's disease?
No, treatments are palliative
Available treatments offer relatively small symptomatic benefits, and caregiving is essentially the treatment.
Q 07Roughly how many people worldwide had Alzheimer's disease as of 2020?
50 million
Prevalence is projected to triple in the coming decades.
Q 08What is the strongest genetic risk factor for the common, sporadic form of Alzheimer's disease?
The APOE epsilon-4 allele
One copy triples the risk and two copies raise it 15-fold; 40 to 80% of patients carry at least one.
Q 09By how much does having two copies of the APOE4 allele raise the risk of the disease?
15 times
Heterozygotes with a single copy face about triple the risk.
Q 10Mutations in which genes cause early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease?
APP, PSEN1 and PSEN2
They account for only 1 to 2 percent of cases, but the inherited form is about 90 percent heritable and progresses fast.
Q 11People with Down syndrome develop Alzheimer's pathology by 40 due to an extra copy of which gene?
APP, on chromosome 21
Trisomy 21 means an extra copy of the amyloid precursor protein gene.
Q 12Roughly how heritable is late-onset Alzheimer's disease?
About 70%
Early-onset disease is even more heritable, at about 90 percent.
Q 13Up to what proportion of Alzheimer's cases are early-onset, striking people in their 30s to mid-60s?
10%
Most cases begin after 65, and less than 5 percent of sporadic cases start earlier.
Q 21What is the only way to definitively diagnose Alzheimer's disease?
Examining brain tissue after death
Imaging and fluid biomarkers now allow a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's during life.
Q 22How many years before clinical diagnosis can detailed neuropsychological testing reveal mild deficits?
Up to eight
By the time symptoms appear the degenerative process has been under way for many years.
Q 23Into how many stages is the course of Alzheimer's disease generally described?
Three
Early or mild, middle or moderate, and late or severe.
Q 14How often does the risk of developing Alzheimer's roughly double after the age of 65?
Every 5 years
Incidence rises from 3 to as much as 69 per thousand person-years.
Q 15Which sex is more often affected by Alzheimer's disease?
Women
The Framingham study found women have almost twice the lifetime risk, not fully explained by longer lifespans.
Q 16What is the median life expectancy after a diagnosis?
Three to twelve years
Men have a less favourable prognosis even after controlling for age.
Q 17Which neurotransmitter is lost through the death of basal forebrain neurons, per the cholinergic hypothesis?
Acetylcholine
That hypothesis produced the drugs that slow the breakdown of the transmitter in the brain.
Q 18Which of these is one of the four cholinesterase-inhibitor drugs used to treat cognitive symptoms?
Donepezil
The others are tacrine, rivastigmine and galantamine.
Q 19Memantine, used for moderate to severe Alzheimer's, was first developed as what?
An anti-influenza agent
It is a noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist with only a small benefit.
Q 20Which two monoclonal antibodies against amyloid beta won FDA approval in 2023 and 2024?
Donanemab and lecanemab
Lecanemab was approved in 2023 and donanemab in 2024; as of 2025 their role remains uncertain because of side effects, efficacy questions and cost.
Q 24Which symptom is described as the most persistent throughout the course of the disease?
Apathy
About 30 percent of patients also develop delusional misidentifications.
Q 25What is the term for the worsening of confusion and agitation in the late afternoon and evening?
Sundowning
Wandering, irritability and emotional lability are common in the middle stage too.
Q 26What name was given to the patient in whom Alois Alzheimer identified the first case in 1901?
Auguste D.
He followed her case until she died in 1906, then reported on it publicly.
Q 27What phrase did the first patient keep repeating when she could not finish writing her name?
'I have lost myself'
Ich habe mich verloren; Alzheimer had asked her many questions and then asked them again to test her memory.
Q 28In which German city was the asylum where the first patient was treated?
Frankfurt
Alzheimer struck a deal to pay for her care in return for her records and brain after death.
Q 29Which psychiatrist, Alzheimer's mentor, first named the disease after him?
Emil Kraepelin
He put it in the eighth edition of his Textbook of Psychiatry in 1910 as presenile dementia.
Q 30Which staining method did Alzheimer use with two Italian physicians to identify plaques and tangles?
Bielschowsky
American Solomon Carter Fuller had given a similar report five months earlier.