FOR nearly three decades, we have waited anxiously for a blockbuster drug that could defeat Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. We believed we had identified the culprit behind this debilitating condition: . Even as drug after drug homing in on this target failed to make a difference to symptoms, we continued to pour more money into the effort.
Regrettably, it is now becoming clear that this time could have been better spent zooming out from beta-amyloid, to look at the big picture of possible Alzheimer鈥檚 causes.
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Doing so reveals a far more complicated and insidious illness. It seems to be a condition that doesn鈥檛 have a lone underlying trigger, but instead results from multiple overlapping processes and risk factors, which you can read about in detail in our cover story.
By thinking of Alzheimer鈥檚 in the same way as we do multifaceted conditions like heart disease, researchers are now combining knowledge from across disciplines to identify, and tackle, the many known risk factors.
鈥淭here is a real possibility that we could dismantle Alzheimer鈥檚 by a thousand tiny cuts鈥�
This new approach comes not a moment too soon, because 10 million new cases of dementia are diagnosed globally each year. The vast majority of these, between 60 and 70 per cent, are Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. As people are living longer than ever, the number of people living with dementia is .
Accepting that Alzheimer鈥檚 is more complicated than we thought might seem disheartening. And yet, targeting the many factors implicated in the disease, including the role of infections, diet, sleep habits and inflammation, puts at least some control back in our own hands, because these are things we can all do something about. It means we don鈥檛 have to simply wait for pharmaceutical companies to deliver: we can also cut our own chances of getting dementia.
Tunnel vision has held us back for too long. With this new approach, a single blockbuster drug might well be out of the picture, but instead, there is a real possibility that we could dismantle Alzheimer鈥檚 by a thousand tiny cuts.
