Charles Piller

You may have seen the news recently about two new FDA-approved blood tests that may detect Alzheimer's disease in the early stages.

Early detection is important for any disease, but especially for Alzheimer's, which can take root for 20 years before symptoms develop.

These symptoms, as you probably know, include memory loss and other cognitive, physiological and behavioral issues.

The reason I say that you probably know these symptoms is because Alzheimer's affects more than 7 million people in the U.S., most of them over 65.

Age-related memory loss has been seen throughout human history, but the disease was not formally documented until 1906 by the German physician Alois Alzheimer.

When Alzheimer autopsied the brain of a woman who had had memory loss and hallucinations, he found that her brain had shrunk and withered with numerous tangles and what he called peculiar deposits.

Scientists have been trying to figure out those deposits and tangles ever since.

The National Institutes of Health spends around $4 billion a year on Alzheimer's and dementia research.

That's up from around $1 billion a decade ago.

And that puts it second only to cancer spending, which makes sense because the elderly population in the US is big and getting bigger.

Much of this Alzheimer's research is centered around one dominant theory of the disease.

But what if that theory is flawed?

So is flawed even the right word, or should it be fraud?

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we follow an investigation that found decades of problematic Alzheimer's research.

And we ask, with some sense of earned optimism, where does Alzheimer's treatment go from here?

The story we are telling today is a sobering one and an important one.

We'll hear from two people.

We had hoped there would be more, but in the end, the others did not want to talk.

You'll understand why as we go.

Let's start here.