Alzheimer ' s Disease as a Condition of Many Subtypes and Contributing Causes

Neurodegeneration in late life is a very complex phenomenon, and its complexity strains against the nice neat clinical definitions of disease found in the textbooks. Different patients with Alzheimer's disease can exhibit quite different mixes of various forms of pathology, developing at different paces and times: aggregates of amyloid-β, tau, and α-synuclein; vascular degeneration; markers of neuroinflammation; metabolic disruption similar to that of diabetes, and so forth. One case of Alzheimer's might be different enough from another to require a different designation. Thus researchers talk about defining subtypes of Alzheimer's disease, or that individual patients have Alzheimer's that is exacerbated by a comorbidity arising from other neurodegenerative processes. Another way of looking at this is to categorize mechanisms that contribute to Alzheimer's. To what degree is a given set of mechanisms important in a given patient? A sizable amount of work has gone into investigation of processes and feedback loops other than the primary amyloid cascade hypothesis of the condition. It is an open question as to where all of these contributing aspects of the condition fit into a chain of cause and consequence, or whether the ordering of that chain is similar from patient to patient. Alzheimer's disease may well be a collection of distinct conditions that all happen to wind up in a similar end state. The authors of this paper draw the gloomy conclusion that this co...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs