Alzheimer’s Research Looks To Define Senior Conditions In Order To Find A Treatment
Many questions strike at the very definition of Alzheimer’s disease. If you can’t define the condition, how can you find a treatment? Research provided in a New York Times article titled “The Diagnosis Is Alzheimer’s publishes some new interesting findings about how dementia is Probably Not the Only Problem.”
Please read the full article for more conclusions, but studies show that plaques and tangles, and other potential villains found in the brains of people with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s include silent strokes and other blood vessel diseases, as well as a poorly understood condition called hippocampal sclerosis. Potential culprits also include an accumulation of Alpha-synuclein, the abnormal protein that makes up Lewy bodies. And some patients have yet another abnormal protein in their brains, called TDP-43.
No one knows how to begin approaching the multitude of other potential problems found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. So, until recently, they were mostly ignored. “I wouldn’t say it’s a dirty little secret,” said Dr. John Hardy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at University College London. “Everybody knows about it. But we don’t know what to do about it.” In interviews, some experts said they had been reluctant to talk much about mixed pathologies for fear of sounding too negative. But “at a certain point we have to be somewhat more realistic and rethink what we are doing,” said Dr. Albert Hofman, chairman of the epidemiology department at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The problem began with the very discovery of Alzheimer’s disease. In 1906, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, a German psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, described a 50-year-old woman with dementia.
On autopsy, he found peculiar plaques and twisted, spaghetti-like proteins known as tangles in her brain. Ever since, they have been considered the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease.
But scientists now believe this woman must have had a very rare genetic mutation that guarantees a person will get a pure form of Alzheimer’s by middle age. Patients with the mutation appeared to develop only plaques and tangles, and no other pathologies. So for decades, plaques and tangles were the focus of research into dementia.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/health/alzheimers-dementia-stroke.html
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