ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE: TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING
Traditionally the pre-senile dementias – those occurring before the age of sixty-five — were considered to be caused by diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Pick’s disease, Huntington’s chorea, and so on, whereas those in older people were thought to be a consequence of ageing of the brain or possibly arteriosclerosis. This confused picture began to be corrected only in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Professor, now Sir Martin, Roth and his colleagues, including Professor Tomlinson and Dr Blessed, examined the brains of a large series of normal old people and also subjects with dementia. They showed quite conclusively that Alzheimer’s disease was the most common cause of dementia in people of all ages, that the next most common cause was dementia resulting from small strokes, and that in a small proportion of people these two conditions occurred together.
Despite this, for many years dementia in the elderly was still considered by many doctors to be caused by hardening of the arteries and it wasn’t until the beginning of the 1980s that research into Alzheimer’s disease really began to gain momentum. A modicum of research was, however, underway in the intervening years and important discoveries were made, including a description of some of the biochemical abnormalities that will be described later. Research into Alzheimer’s really took off, however, in the mid-eighties and throughout the world all the latest techniques that are employed in medical research are being focused on this condition.
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