Good news about Alzheimer’s
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Why is Alzheimer’s disease described as a loss of identity and memory?
Alzheimer's disease is uniquely terrifying to many people, in part because it gradually causes people to lose their sense of who they are. It's a gradual process, losing your keys or having a hard time remembering the name of an old friend or someone who you knew a long time ago, to uh increasingly losing everyday memory. That allow you to navigate the world, including where you are in in your town, even in your home, when it gets worse. And when you start to lose those memories, you also start to lose your relationships with people. It becomes a a disease that is very cruel in the way it captures your sense of self.
Good news for people who hate Alzheimer's coming up on today's Splain from Vox.
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Today explained Sean Ramos firm. Something like 7 million Americans have Alzheimer's, something like 50 million people around the world. And those aren't quite cancer numbers, but think of how many treatments we have for cancer: surgery, chemo, radiation, immunotherapies, stem cell transplants. The list goes on. But Alzheimer's, the list is short. A couple of treatments to slow it down, nothing to roll it back. certainly nothing close to a cure for the disease thus far. We asked Science Magazine investigative journalist Charles Piller why that is.
In order to understand the answer to that, let me take you back actually more than a hundred years. To the when the when Alzheimer's was named, its namesake scientist, uh Elois Alzheimer. He did an autopsy of a woman who had terrible dementia. And what he found in her brain were two kinds of proteins, uh, one he called plaques and one tangles. Plaques are uh something called amyloid protein, and tangles are made up of this protein called tau. So the disease was defined as plaques, tangles, and dementia. That's Alzheimer's disease. Now at the time in the early 1900s, it was more of a curiosity than anything else because not that many people Reached the very old age where Alzheimer's would normally kick in.
And so what you had was a very small number of people who reached that old age and got Alzheimer's disease. So people were interested, neurologists were interested in it way back then. But it wasn't a big, huge medical problem the way it is today. But then over the decades, you had the development of vaccines and antibiotics and treatment. For a lot of other important diseases like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. And suddenly you had this explosion of people living to into their 60s, 70s, 80s, into the period of life when Alzheimer's becomes common.
So this doesn't become that big a problem until life starts getting better and longer for people.
How did the early 20th‑century discovery of plaques and tangles shape Alzheimer’s research?
That's right. That's right. It's a it's a a problem that's existed for hundreds, thousands of years, but in very small numbers. Back in the seventies, eighties, nineties, there was a lot of effort to try to look at what the underlying causes of Alzheimer's disease were. And that's when the development of something called the amyloid cascade hypothesis came onto the scene. Next tonight, a new development in understanding and possibly treating Alzheimer's disease. And this study. what the focus was on a particular protein, beta amyloid. which when injected into the brains of laboratory animals was found to induce very similar types of abnormal changes as is seen in Alzheimer's disease, specifically nerve cell uh damage and degeneration.
And so the idea behind this theory, which is a beautiful theory of the idea of the disease, is that the development, the deposits of amyloid proteins that cause these plaques in the brain, lead to a series of biochemical events in the brain that eventually cause Alzheimer's dementia.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why is Alzheimer’s disease described as a loss of identity and memory?
0:01–3:55
2
How did the early 20th‑century discovery of plaques and tangles shape Alzheimer’s research?
3:55–7:40
3
What is the amyloid cascade hypothesis and why did it dominate for decades?
7:40–14:19
4
How did doctored images in a key amyloid‑beta study expose a major research scandal?
14:19–19:21
5
Which FDA‑approved drugs now offer the first real treatment options for Alzheimer’s?
19:21–23:53
6
What new therapeutic targets—tau, inflammation, and vascular health—are emerging beyond amyloid?
23:53–26:42