Alzheimer's Disease Trivia
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99 free Alzheimer's Disease trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alzheimer's causes most dementia, but which rarer type was actor Bruce Willis diagnosed with in 2023?
Frontotemporal dementia
Frontotemporal dementia. It tends to strike earlier than other dementias and often shows first in language or behaviour, which is why his family first announced aphasia; Alzheimer's causes 60 to 70 percent of dementia cases.
Q 02How did fellow psychiatrists respond when Alois Alzheimer first presented his landmark case in 1906?
With no questions at all
With no questions at all. The chairman said there was no need for discussion and moved on to talks that drew long, lively debate; a disappointed Alzheimer published the case the following year.
Q 03Which brain region is among the first that Alzheimer's disease damages?
The hippocampus
The hippocampus. It is essential for forming new memories, which is why early Alzheimer's blurs this morning's conversation while leaving decades-old memories largely intact.
Q 04What do doctors call memory loss that is worse than normal ageing but doesn't yet disrupt daily life?
Mild cognitive impairment
Mild cognitive impairment. It can be an early stage of Alzheimer's, but not everyone who has it goes on to develop dementia: in some people the symptoms stay the same or even improve.
Q 05Which protein forms the neurofibrillary tangles inside neurons?
Tau
Tau. In a healthy neuron it steadies the tracks that carry nutrients along the cell; in Alzheimer's it lets go, sticks to other tau molecules and forms tangles that block the transport system.
Q 06Which metal has long been suspected of causing Alzheimer's, though decades of studies have found no convincing evidence?
Aluminium
Aluminium. Studies of people exposed to high levels have pointed both ways, and very little of the metal a person takes in comes from the cookware and drink cans that worried people.
Q 07A landmark study of ageing and Alzheimer's followed 678 members of which group, who all agreed to donate their brains?
Catholic nuns
Catholic nuns. In the Nun Study, essays the sisters wrote on entering their order more than half a century earlier foretold who would develop Alzheimer's: the denser in ideas, the lower the risk.
Q 08What is the strongest known genetic risk factor for the common, late-onset form of Alzheimer's disease?
The APOE epsilon-4 allele
The APOE epsilon-4 allele. About one person in five carries a copy and two copies raise the risk further, yet some carriers never develop the disease, so it signals risk, not fate.
Q 09Which actor learned while filming his series Limitless that he carries two copies of a gene variant tied to Alzheimer's?
Chris Hemsworth
Chris Hemsworth. He inherited one copy from each parent, which his doctor on the show said makes the disease eight to ten times likelier, and his grandfather already had it.
Q 10The world's largest known family with an inherited, early-striking form of Alzheimer's lives in which South American country?
Colombia
Colombia. Neurologist Francisco Lopera spent over 30 years tracing the family around Medellín, whose mutation usually brings memory loss by the mid-40s; one carrier who stayed sharp until 67 is now a clue to resisting it.
Q 11Adults with which condition usually show Alzheimer's brain changes by 40?
Down syndrome
Down syndrome. The extra chromosome 21 carries the APP gene, which makes the amyloid in plaques, so they build decades early; even so, not everyone who has them goes on to develop dementia.
Q 12The estimate that Alzheimer's is about 70% heritable comes from studying whom?
Twins
Twins. Comparing them puts the inherited share at 60 to 80 percent, yet the risk genes found so far explain much less of it, a gap geneticists call missing heritability.
Q 13Which fantasy author called his early-onset Alzheimer's an 'embuggerance' in 2007?
Terry Pratchett
Q 21Before the early 2000s, what was the only sure way to confirm Alzheimer's disease?
Examining brain tissue after death
Examining brain tissue after death. Pathologists looked for the plaques and tangles first described in 1906; brain scans and spinal-fluid tests can now reveal the same signs in a living person.
Q 22Doctors check for a shortage of which vitamin because it can cause memory loss and confusion that mimic dementia?
Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12. A deficiency can bring confusion and memory problems, and unlike Alzheimer's the damage can often be halted or even reversed with treatment, which is why doctors rule it out early.
Q 23In which 2004 film does an elderly man read a love story to his wife, whose dementia has erased it?
Terry Pratchett. The Discworld creator, then 59, said the disease lay behind what doctors had taken for a stroke, and he spent his last years campaigning for dementia research and the right to an assisted death.
Q 14What is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer's disease?
Advancing age
Advancing age. After 65 the risk roughly doubles every five years, yet Alzheimer's is not a normal part of ageing: even past 85, about two people in three do not have it.
Q 15Almost two-thirds of Americans living with Alzheimer's belong to which group?
Women
Women. Longer lives were long thought to explain the gap, but researchers have begun to ask whether women's risk is also higher at any given age.
Q 16Which country star's farewell tour after his 2011 Alzheimer's diagnosis became the documentary I'll Be Me?
Glen Campbell
Glen Campbell. Three of his children backed him on stage through the tour, and the film's theme, 'I'm Not Gonna Miss You', brought the 'Rhinestone Cowboy' singer an Oscar nomination.
Q 17Several Alzheimer's drugs ease symptoms by slowing the breakdown of which chemical messenger?
Acetylcholine
Acetylcholine. It carries signals for memory and learning, and the disease kills the cells that make it; the drugs stretch what is left, which helps for a time but does not stop the damage.
Q 18Which drug is commonly prescribed to ease the memory symptoms of Alzheimer's disease?
Donepezil
Donepezil. Sold as Aricept, it is approved for every stage from mild to severe, yet it only eases symptoms for a time and does nothing to slow the disease underneath.
Q 19Which herbal supplement, long sold as a memory aid, failed to prevent dementia in a six-year US trial of 3,000 older adults?
Ginkgo biloba
Ginkgo biloba. People taking the leaf extract developed dementia at the same rate as those on a placebo, and US health officials say it has not been shown to work for any condition.
Q 20Lecanemab and donanemab both won US approval with a boxed warning about what?
Brain swelling and bleeding
Brain swelling and bleeding. Both drugs are antibodies that strip amyloid from the brain, and the risk is highest in people with two copies of a common risk gene, so patients are gene-tested and scanned.
The Notebook
The Notebook. Nicholas Sparks based the novel on his wife's grandparents, who had spent more than 60 years together; in the book the wife's illness is named as Alzheimer's.
Q 24Which is the most common behavioural or psychological symptom of Alzheimer's disease?
Apathy
Apathy. Patients lose their drive and interest, a change often taken for depression, yet the two are separate: apathy can come without any of the sadness or guilt.
Q 25What is the term for the worsening of confusion and agitation in the late afternoon and evening?
Sundowning
Sundowning. It is a pattern of behaviour, not a disease, and the suspected triggers are end-of-day exhaustion, dim light that fills a room with shadows, and a daily rhythm the illness has thrown off.
Q 26By what name is the first patient Alois Alzheimer described with the disease known in medical history?
Auguste D.
Auguste D. She was Auguste Deter, a railway clerk's wife whose husband brought her to an asylum after she turned jealous, confused and sleepless; Alzheimer followed her case for five years.
Q 27What did Alois Alzheimer's first patient keep saying as she struggled with a writing test in 1901?
'I have lost myself'
'I have lost myself'. She added 'so to speak', and Alzheimer took down her answers word for word; asked what she was eating, pork and cauliflower, she answered 'spinach'.
Q 28In which German city did Alois Alzheimer treat the first patient he described with the disease?
Frankfurt
Frankfurt. He left the city soon afterwards but kept asking after her until she died, and her handwritten file, lost for decades, turned up in a Frankfurt clinic archive in the 1990s.
Q 29Which psychiatrist, Alois Alzheimer's superior, named the disease after him in a 1910 textbook?
Emil Kraepelin
Emil Kraepelin. He coined the name for what then seemed a very rare illness of middle age, and it was nearly forgotten for half a century, until the 1970s widened it to the far commoner dementia of old age.
Q 30Which Supreme Court justice, whose husband had Alzheimer's, announced her own dementia diagnosis in 2018?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor. The court's first woman justice stepped down in 2006, in part to care for her husband, and withdrew from public life when dementia reached her too.