Formulating Treatment to Cure Alzheimer's Dementia: Approach #2

There are two generic approaches to curing any medical condition. The first one treats every patient for all the known possible causes that contribute to pathogenesis; the second one individualizes potentially curative therapy by only identifying in each separate patient the components of pathogenesis that are actually operative and treating those. This article adopts the second approach for formulating a cure for Alzheimer's dementia (AD). The components of AD's pathogenesis are, in alphabetical order, as follows: circadian rhythm disturbances, depression, diabetes and insulin resistance, dyslipidemia, hypertension, inflammation, metabolic syndrome, mitochondrial dysfunction, nutritional deficiencies, TGF-β deficiency, underweight, vascular abnormalities, and Wnt/β-catenin deficiency. For each component, data are described that show the degree to which its prevalence is higher in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who did not revert to having normal cognition than in those who did because the former group is the pool of patients in which future AD may develop. Only addressing the components that are present in a particular individual potentially is a curative strategy. Published data indicate that curative therapy requires the number of such components that are addressed to be ≥3. Although structural brain changes cannot be directly addressed, the impaired neural tracts result from many of the reversible causal elements, so correcting them will benefit these tracts.