Alzheimer's Year in Review

The Alzheimer's Association just published a review of the promising advances that occurred during 2019 in Alzheimer's research.  Taken together, they are quite encouraging.  This is in the face of the aducanumab drama.  (While aducanumab shows promise, in the best case it won't deliver on the the power we anticipated as recently as five years ago.)

Here are the advances they discussed:

• Blood tests promise early, accurate diagnosis.  We discussed this in September 2018.  It will be great to identify Alzheimer's disease, even before the first symptoms appear, but early diagnosis has it's own liabilities.  As we have found, many of us just don't want to know if Alzheimer's is in our future.  And a diagnosis will likely affect our health care and long term care eligibility.   On the other hand, it will be an incredible benefit to researchers to be able to identify subjects in the phase of the disease when an intervention is most likely to be beneficial.  This may significantly enrich the pool of test subjects.
• More and better research supports how lifestyle changes can address Alzheimer's disease.  They must have read Beating the Dementia Monster.
• Correlation between hearing and vision loss with Alzheimer's disease suggests there may be more interventions that can affect risk.  We discussed a connection between glaucoma and Alzheimer's risk in November 2018.  We noted that I was diagnosed with glaucoma shortly before I was diagnosed with MCI due to Alzheimer's disease, so there may be a connection there.
• There is new understanding about the differences between men and women in how Alzheimer's disease develops and progresses.  This may provide new insights on the disease mechanisms.
• New drug targets were identified, notably in neuroinflammation.  What can we change in our biochemistry, diseases, and other characteristics that will influence our risk?  In November we discussed one apparent dead-end, but addressing neuroinflammation continues to show promise.   

Happy New Year to all!  Let's hope for more advances in 2010.