TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kalvach, Pavel
AU  - Vogner, Martin
PY  - 2019
DA  - 2019/07/08
TI  - Parting with the Concept of Alzheimer’s Disease in Senium
JO  - OBM Geriatrics
SP  - 060
VL  - 03
IS  - 03
AB  - Our understanding of the mental deterioration associated with old-age have undergone a number of changes over the past two centuries and have spurred major scientific debates. In the 19th century, this disorder was still considered to be an inevitable feature of aging. The dawn of the 20th century offered a histological explanation for presenile dementia, and Alois Alzheimer was credited as the discoverer of a new disease that bears his name. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the findings of Alois Alzheimer were massively applied also to late-onset dementia, thus virtually excluding natural intellectual impairment as an explanation. In contradiction to Alzheimer´s original concept, amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles are now considered the cause of psychic depreciation at all ages, and their presence is interpreted as a disease.
We wish to dispute these common views and suggest that continuing with this approach may be increasingly counterproductive.
Instead, we offer an unbiased view without any preconceived ideas, which respects a long list of natural biological failures that inevitably accompany every human life, i.e., microinjuries, microinfarcts, leukoaraiosis as a consequence of partly failing cerebral blood flow, microbleeds, glycemic fluctuations in diabetics, alcohol and toxic influences, decreasing anisotropy, increasing mean diffusivity on MRIs, and many others.
SN  - 2638-1311
UR  - https://doi.org/10.21926/obm.geriatr.1903060
DO  - 10.21926/obm.geriatr.1903060
ID  - Kalvach2019
ER  -