Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia worldwide, with 500,000 people currently living with the disease in the UK alone and, with an ageing population, this number is only going to increase. Despite huge efforts, there are relatively few treatments for AD and so far these all only treat specific symptoms of the disease and don’t combat the disease itself. For example, some current drugs allow brain cells (neurones) to keep communicating with each other for longer without dying, but inevitably these cells will be overwhelmed by the disease. Other people have tried to treat the disease by replacing the lost cells with new ones , but without removing the disease these cells will still die after a time too. What is needed is a treatment that actually combats the cause of the disease itself. This has been a very difficult task with AD, as it is not entirely certain how the disease works. It is generally believed that the misfolding of a protein, called β (beta) a
A place for me to share my thoughts on science, data and the world