A missing Coweta county woman with dementia was recovered Tuesday afternoon by Georgia authorities.

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports that after a weekend-long search effort, 78-year-old Eleanor Alexander was found injured and immediately flown by helicopter to Atlanta Medical Center, where she remains in critical condition as of Tuesday afternoon.

Alexander reportedly went missing in rural Coweta County, Ga., late Friday night. By early Saturday, authorities had already begun mobilizing the search effort, scouring the area on foot and horseback as well as in helicopters and four-wheelers.

"There are a lot of ponds and lakes in the area, and we worried she had fallen or stumbled in to one of them," Lt. Col. James Yarbrough of the Coweta County Sheriff's Office told reporters. "During the middle of the night, we were concerned about animals getting to her."

The search teams converged on Alexander on Tuesday afternoon, four days after she went missing. Alexander, who was discovered not far from her home off Providence Church Road, was reportedly in poor shape when authorities finally found her, but luckily, she was still breathing.

Coweta County Sheriff's Office: "She Walked Into Barbed-Wire Fence"

"She was not alert, but she was breathing and covered with bug bites," Yarbrough said. "She was in bed clothes and her body temperature was below 80 degrees, and she had walked into a barbed-wire fence."

"Since she's been at Atlanta Medical Center, reports are that her body temperature is up, she's alert and doing a lot better," he continued.

The missing Coweta woman represents the latest in a long line of similar cases, in which elderly people suffering from debilitating conditions like Alzheimer's disease wander off, lose track of themselves and ultimately fail to find their way back home.

Coweta Woman Found, But Others Remain

"These things can happen any given time. All it takes is a caregiver who's working really hard, to turn around for a second and the person can wander," Beth Kallmyer, vice president of constituent services at the Alzheimer's Association, told reporters from The Huffington Post when asked about the missing Helen Cook, a 72-year-old Alzheimer's patient last seen on July 13 near Warsaw, Mo.

Cook's husband of 51 years, Howard, said that she simply disappeared. One moment she was sitting on the porch swing of their rural Benton County home; the next moment, she was gone.

Unlike the Coweta County woman, Cook has not yet been recovered, despite numerous search efforts and public announcements.

Dementia is caused by a variety of conditions, including Alzheimer's disease and stroke. According to The National Institute of Health (NIH), memory loss is only one of the many ways in which the condition manifests. Other signs of dementia include impaired problem-solving abilities, failure to control emotions, and general personality changes.