Introduction to the special issue on Alzheimer's disease.

摘要

It is just over 100 years since the German physician Alois Alzheimer first described distinctive neuropathological features in the post-mortem brain of a French women whose profound dementia he had been studying in the 5 years prior to her death. Within a few years of this first study, this form of dementia was becoming known as Alzheimer's disease (AD) around the world. One imagines he would be shocked if able to witness the worldwide healthcare issue that the AD represents today, as well as the unsettling predictions for the growth of the sufferer population over the next 50 years. Alzheimer would, no doubt, also be fascinated by the encyclopaedic body of data that 100 years of AD research has yielded and perhaps astonished that almost every pharmaceutical company is dedicating substantial resources to try to alleviate, slow or stop AD.