Alzheimer’s disease: still a perplexing problem

“Dementia now stands alongside cancer as one of the greatest enemies of humanity,” said UK prime minister David Cameron at last month’s global dementia legacy event. He went on to announce the world’s biggest population study into dementias and a quadrupling of dementia research funding over the next decade. However, he was also aware of some of the huge challenges: “We don’t yet know anything like enough about how the brain becomes diseased . . . Only three out of 101 dementia drugs developed between 1998 and 2011 have made it to market.”1

Alzheimer’s disease, the commonest cause of dementia, was named over a century ago and exemplifies these challenges. Alois Alzheimer published his report “About A Peculiar Disease of the Cerebral Cortex” in 1907 after examining Auguste Deter, a 51 year old woman, in an asylum. He noted she was disorientated in time and place and that “her ability to retain information is impaired to the profoundest degree.”