Is Alzheimer's a curable disease?

Alzheimer’s disease has been the focus of rigorous research and study for over three decades when it was first labeled a disease. In all that time, there has been no discovery of a pathogenic cause of Alzheimer’s disease and subsequently, no cure.

In an effort to identify why the mystery of Alzheimer’s eludes researchers, Ming Chen, PhD, Huey T. Nguyen, BS, and Darrell R. Sawmiller, PhD, Aging Research Laboratory, R&D Service, Bay Pines VA Healthcare System and University of South Florida, undertook and analysis of the fundamental presumptions about Alzheimer’s. They now believe the main problem with Alzheimer’s is the researchers’ perceptions of the disease.

The problem may be very simply that when the medical community extricated dementia from other senile conditions and redefined it as a curable disease, it may have inadvertently misdirected the research. Now they are looking for pathogens and cures, the cause and effect factors. Perhaps there aren’t any.

The authors suggest that dementia should have stayed aligned with other types of disease or conditions of age. That it differs only by origin, study paradigm and interventions strategy. In other words, it is an inevitable part of aging. It can be delayed with lifestyle choice, it’s severity can be lessened and once acquired it can be treated no differently than something like osteoporosis or arteriosclerosis.

“The model implies that senile dementia is, by and large, a lifestyle disease,” says Dr. Chen. “This view, in fact, has been shared by many in the medical and clinical community, but contrasts sharply with current dominant theories in the Alzheimer research field, which assume a linear and ‘cause and effect’ mechanism. Since they have not taken into account the fundamental roles of aging and risk factors, it is clear that these theories, though highly appealing to the public and researchers alike, are of little relevance to the scientific nature of senile dementia.”

Source: Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, MedicalNewsToday