The Decomposition of Alzheimer ' s Disease

The biochemistry of Alzheimer's disease is complex and varied, still incompletely mapped at the detail level. At the edges it merges into grey areas shared with other forms of neurodegeneration - a large number of Alzheimer's patients are diagnosed with other forms of dementia or cognitive impairment. That Alzheimer's is one item in the official list of diseases, that the borders between various forms of neurodegeneration are drawn as they are, is a historical accident carried across more than a century of the taxonomy of disease, not a reflection of current opinions. The age-related dysfunction of the brain is driven by numerous pathological processes. Differences of relative degree between these progresses, and in the locations in the brain that are worst affected, mix and match to produce the various named age-related conditions, collections of different symptoms. The classification of those symptoms into the buckets called diseases happened in most cases long before modern investigations of neural biochemistry. So we have the country of Alzheimer's disease, whose borders as drawn by symptoms and present fairly crude methods of diagnosis encompass what will probably come to be understood as several distinct conditions. They also likely enclose portions of other known conditions, such as vascular dementia, and this muddies the waters in many ways. In the years ahead, as the first therapies arrive to effectively address the underlying processes that produce neurodegen...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs