Medicine
Scientific American (June 2010), 302, 50-57
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0610-50
Alzheimer's: Forestalling the Darkness
Gary Stix
Interventions before symptoms appear could be key to slowing or stopping the leading cause of dementia
KEY CONCEPTS
- The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease continues to rise as the population ages, but effective treatments are lacking.
- Some new drugs may have failed because they were tried too late.
- New techniques to track the disease before symptoms arise may allow testing of drugs at a stage when they may be more effective.
—The Editors
In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health.
In a 21st-century parallel to the townspeople of Macondo, a few hundred residents from Medellín, Colombia, and nearby coffee-growing areas may get a chance to assist in the search for something akin to a real-life version of the gypsy’s concoction. Medellín and its environs are home to the world’s largest contingent of individuals with a hereditary form of Alzheimer’s disease. Members of 25 extended families, with 5,000 members, develop early-onset Alzheimer’s, usually before the age of 50, if they harbor an aberrant version of a particular gene.
