Alzheimer's and Amyloid, A Summary
About this episode
This episode discusses the failures of the Amyloid Hypothesis in explaining Alzheimer's disease through historical and recent scientific studies.
What you see below is not grape soda. It is urine from a human being—Purple Urinary Bag Syndrome, as it’s called, is quite something to behold. But it is brief, and happens when bacteria interact with the plastic of a urinary bag. Treating the underlying infection (typically mild, if there is one) is all that’s required. The color is a distraction. At the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich, Germany, in 1906 a similar distraction was discovered by an enterprising young neurologist named Alois Alzheimer. On slides from the brain of a woman who died of early-onset dementia, Dr. Alzheimer saw plaques that looked deeply abnormal, crying out for explanation. Surely something so striking must be the cause, he thought. But that is not a question that can be answered by gestalt , as the German doctor might have said. It is a question for wissenschäft — for science. In part 1 we reviewed two autopsy studies from the 1990s, the first real scientific test of Dr. Alzheimer’s hypothesis that amyloid plaques cause dementia. His Amyloid Hypothesis failed: both found no association between amyloid burden and dementia. In Part 2 we saw landmark studies from the early 2000s that again disproved the…
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