'We must make the most of Alzheimer's disease research,' say two UK professors

The focus of research has shifted significantly away from established and moderately severe Alzheimer’s disease to the much earlier stages of the illness and in some cases when symptoms are very mild or even absent. People have called this “Prodromal” Alzheimer’s disease or “Asymptomatic” Alzheimer’s disease.

This is the view of Alistair Burns, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry and Vice Dean for the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences at The University of Manchester, and Prof Martin Rossor, the NIHR National Director for Dementia Research, Director of the NIHR Queen Square Dementia Biomedical Research Unit and a NIHR Senior Investigator which was posted as a blog on NHS England’s website today. It is important to plan for the future but there is some thinking and planning to be done before we arrive there, they said.

The Blog continues: For technocrats like us, of course, dementia is defined as a clinical syndrome and by definition has to have symptoms. So one would not talk about pre-symptomatic dementia (that would include everybody who did not have dementia, a bit like the club of which we are members, ie, people who have not yet won the Nobel Prize for medicine). As Alzheimer’s disease is largely defined in terms of the brain deposition of amyloid plaques and abnormal tangles of nerve fibers (due to the deposition of tau protein), you can certainly have these in the absence of symptoms.