On September 21, 2022, Yuetan Street in Beijing held the theme event of the "Playing with Brain Training and Enjoying Happy Older Years" in Happy Elderly Retirement Brain Competition, and the elderly in the community train their brains by participating in intellectual games. Photo by Wang Jianing, reporter of Beijing News,
September 21 this year, is the 29th World Alzheimer's Day .
Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease that is currently difficult to cure. National Health Commission html released data on the 420th, showing that there are 10 million Alzheimer's disease patients in my country aged 60 and above, accounting for about one-fifth of Alzheimer's disease patients in the world.
Comprehensive understanding of Alzheimer's disease
Alzheimer's disease is commonly known as " Alzheimer's disease ", and will "steal" people's memories without realizing it. Many people have only seen Alzheimer's disease patients in film and television works, such as the heroine Haifen (played by Haiqing ) in the TV series "Late Night Dining Room: Flowers Blooming on the Other Side" is a mother who looks quite young and fashionable, but she remembers the wrong date of her daughter's return, and she often loses her life.
In fact, this is the gentlest and mildest symptom of Alzheimer's disease patients. Forgottenness is just a common phenomenon in Alzheimer's disease. What's even worse is that patients may have strange temperaments, such as audio hallucinations and even violent violence, harming themselves and their relatives and friends around them. This requires getting rid of the cognition of the past - even if you forget the whole world, you will not forget to love you. In fact, patients forget everything, including memories, emotions and love for their loved ones and friends.
movie " Still Alice " tells another truth about Alzheimer's disease. The patient suffered from amnesia and lost his personality and dignity, and his behavior was worse than that of a 3-year-old child, which made his family helpless and affected the life of the whole family.
Due to the particularity of this disease, people hope to develop effective drugs to cure this disease as soon as possible. But at present, Alzheimer's disease can only be used to delay the progress and worsening of the disease through symptomatic treatment. Stills from the movie "Although Alice".
The tortuous path of medical research
In addition, the research on the causes of Alzheimer's disease is now in trouble. Once, the mainstream in the international medical community believed that the cause of Alzheimer's disease is the abnormal accumulation of tau and β-amyloid (Aβ) in the brain, causing patients to develop neurodegenerative symptoms. The first to propose this theory and was recognized by Sylvan Lesne who worked in the Karen Ashe Laboratory of the University of Minnesota.
In the next 16 years, drug research and development and clinical treatment based on this theory have always failed, and even made no progress. What is even more surprising is that on July 21, 2022, the American Journal of Science published a six-month investigation report, pointing out that there may be academic misconduct in more than 20 papers published by Lesne and others, including the pioneering paper on the cause of Alzheimer's disease published in Nature in 2006.
The basis is that tampered or repeated images and suspicious data were found in dozens of journal papers. This report has been submitted to NIH .
In this regard, , one of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine winners and a neuroscientist at Stanford University in the United States, said that the most direct and obvious damage is the wasting of the National Institutes of Health funds and research thinking in this field - researchers use these results as the starting point for their experiments. The worst effect may be that it has misled the world's 16-year study of Alzheimer's disease.
1998-2017 Alzheimer's new drug research situation. Beijing News map
etiology is still being explored
There are many studies pointing out that the cause of Alzheimer's disease is not certain. A team of Dr. Hyde, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School in the United States, conducted another investigation into Alzheimer's disease research. They systematically evaluated more than 200,000 literature published since 1990, trying to sort out and understand the certainty of biological channels related to Alzheimer's disease.
However, in at least 5 literatures, almost all biological channels (91%) were associated with Alzheimer's disease, and in more than 100 literatures, hundreds of channels were associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Since there are hundreds of biological channels related to Alzheimer's disease, it is difficult to find several pathogenic factors (channels) that are the only ones in Alzheimer's disease, or at least have strong correlation.
Now, there seem to be hundreds of causes of Alzheimer's disease, so it is difficult to determine the real cause of Alzheimer's disease, and it is even more difficult to develop drugs based on this. Therefore, in the face of Alzheimer's disease, humans are still wandering in the quest. However, through the comparison of different research results, one day, the real cause of Alzheimer's disease will be found, and targeted drugs will be developed to cure the disease.
Today, what we can do is to give more care to patients with Alzheimer's disease, and at the same time take some preventive measures, such as regular brain exercise, etc.
Written by/Zhang Tiankan (Popular Science Writer)
Edited by/Xu Qiuying
Proofreading/Chen Diyan
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-