RECENT ADVANCES IN ALZHEIMER'S RESEARCH

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Alzheimer's disease: Difficulty in devising a treatmentResearch on AD is difficult for two important reasons. First, AD develops slowly and is difficult to diagnose. Cognitive deficits vary between patients, and correlate to the amount of education and social interaction the patient has experienced in his or her lifetime. Poor performance on an IQ test, for example, may reflect a lower level of education, and not Alzheimer's disease. Thus it is necessary to have a well-documented patient history (mental as well as physical) and this is not always available. Secondly, it is difficult to obtain accurate histochemical information, which would require observation of brain samples during different phases of the disease. However, neurological biopsies are ethically questionable, and brain dissection can only be performed post-mortem