Biomarkers and Precision Medicine in Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in the elderly, which is the fifth major cause of mortality for people over 65 years. While some of the hereditary genetic risk factors can be connected to the known amyloid and tau hypothesis, many treatments targeting this pathophysiology have failed in clinical trials or ineffectiveness of the drugs are attributed to the heterogeneous and multifactorial nature of AD. Thus, there is an urgent need to focus on finding therapeutic targets that can mitigate disease progression on patient based personalized medicine. This approach of precision medicine can tailor the potential treatment to a specific individual, so it is optimized for the maximum efficacy with minimum risk of side effects. To be able to understand varying responses among patients, identifying biomarkers that can be used as the therapeutic effectiveness will be of great interest. Here we describe advancement of precision medicine and biomarkers that can be essential tools for detection of the disease as well as for a marker of disease progression after intervention.