Alzheimer’s Disease Review Articles

 Although dementia has been described in ancient texts over many centuries, our knowledge of its underlying causes is little more than a century old. Alzheimer advertised his now brilliant case study only 110 years ago, and our modern understanding of the disease that bears his name, and its neuropsychological consequences, really only began to accelerate in the 1980s. Since then we've supported an blast of basic and translational research into the causes, characterizations, and possible treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other dementias. We review this lineage of labor beginning with Alzheimer’s own writings and drawings, then jump to the fashionable era beginning within the 1970s and early 1980s and supply a sampling of neuropsychological and other contextual work from each ensuing decade. During the 1980s our field began its foundational studies of profiling the neuropsychological deficits related to AD and its differentiation from other dementias (e.g., cortical vs. subcortical dementias). The 1990s continued these efforts and commenced to spot the precise cognitive mechanisms suffering from various neuropathologic substrates. The 2000s ushered during a specialise in the study of prodromal stages of neurodegenerative disease before the full-blown dementia syndrome. The current decade has seen the increase of imaging and other biomarkers to characterize preclinical disease before the event of serious cognitive decline. Finally, we propose future directions and predictions for dementia-related research and potential therapeutic interventions.