Prevention is better than cure

摘要

In 1907, Bavarian psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer published his description of a delusional woman who had slowly lost all cognitive function and died at 55 years of age. For decades thereafter, because of the patients age, Alzheimer's presenile dementia' was considered a rare disease of mid-life. In the 1970s, neuropathologists realized that 'senile dementia' was indistinguishable from the disease described by Alzheimer1. The clinical picture of progressive brain dysfunction in association with the postmortem brain pathology of extracellular amyloid deposits ('plaques') and intraneu-ronal 'tangles' was renamed 'Alzheimer's disease', and its definition was broadened to include the major cause of dementia that we know today.