Concepts of Alzheimer disease

the long version

The origin of this collection of essays was a 1997 symposium held to celebrate the life, legacy, and work of Alois Alzheimer, who described the disease in 1907. One of the first chapters of the book tells the fascinating story of how the case notes for Alzheimer's article were recently discovered in the archives of his department in Frankfurt. In a book focused on the history of Alzheimer's disease, we can see the evolution of our concepts of this disease. It was described clinically at first and then pathologically. In the 1970s and 1980s, the disorder was viewed as a neurochemical entity (the cholinergic hypothesis). Today, we consider Alzheimer's disease a genetic disorder (related to chromosomes and apolipoprotein E). How will we view it in the future?