Is Alzheimer’s a Collection of Diseases to Be Treated Separately?

Deciphering the mechanism that underlies the development of Alzheimer’s disease in certain families but not in others, researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Faculty of Medicine have proposed that the malady is actually a collection of diseases that probably should be treated with a variety of different approaches.

The late onset feature typical to distinct neurodegenerative diseases, and the common temporal emergence patterns of these maladies, raise key questions: first, why do individuals who carry disease-linked mutation show no clinical signs until their fifth or sixth decade of life? In addition, why do apparently distinct disorders share a common temporal emergence pattern?

One possible explanation is that as people age, the efficiency of the mechanisms that protect younger people from the toxic aggregation of proteins declines, thus exposing them to disease. Indeed, previous studies clearly indicate that the aging process plays key roles in enabling neurodegenerative disorders to onset late in life.

READ FULL ARTICLE From EurekAlert