Alzheimer’s disease remains the nightmare of numerous people, as we’re talking about a condition that can progressively rob a person of their memory, mental health, and even identity. Alzheimer’s is a disease that can make an intellectual behave like a one-year-old child, and unfortunately, it remains incurable.
However, it needs to be said that the medical world has been through significant progress when it comes to understanding Alzheimer’s disease. While last time we spoke about why cancer remains an incurable disease, it’s time to find out why the most common form of dementia falls into the same category.
The complexity of the disease
Alzheimer’s disease is complex, which is why it gives doctors and medical researchers so many headaches. The disease involves a combination of environmental, genetic, and lifestyle factors that will contribute to the onset and progression. Even today, doctors still cannot say for sure which is the exact cause of Alzheimer’s. Therefore, there’s no wonder why the world still doesn’t have effective treatments against this terrible disease.
Neurodegeneration
Neurons don’t have the ability to regenerate themselves, nor can they be replaced. Alzheimer’s is a disease characterized by progressive neurodegeneration. In other words, this terrible disease has the ability to gradually deteriorate and kill brain cells, particularly neurons. Considering that doctors don’t know a way to replace or regenerate neurons, it becomes impossible to reverse the damage caused by Alzheimer’s to the patient’s brain.
Brain pathology
When a person suffers from Alzheimer’s, an accumulation of abnormal protein deposits takes place in the brain, including tau tangles and beta-amyloid plaques. Such pathological changes are able to disrupt communication between nerve cells and will lead to the degeneration of brain tissue.
Therefore, it has proven to be extremely difficult to develop treatments that can effectively target and clear those protein aggregates without causing harmful side effects.
Lack of knowledge regarding the early disease mechanisms
Even before the symptoms of Alzheimer’s become noticeable, the disease is believed to be able to develop itself for years or even decades in the victim’s brain. Major brain damage may have already kicked in by the time clinical symptoms show their presence. In other words, doctors need to understand more about early detection and the earliest disease mechanisms, as that could enable interventions to slow or even prevent the progression of the disease.
Clinical trial challenges
It’s also important to keep in mind that developing new treatments for Alzheimer’s is challenging because of the difficulties regarding clinical trials, such as the recruitment of participants, trial design, and measurement of the results. Numerous treatments that doctors had faith in have failed during clinical trials. In other words, Alzheimer’s is a more complex and difficult-to-treat disease than many of us thought.
Lack of effective treatments
Perhaps the best reason why Alzheimer’s remains an incurable disease is that there is no known cure for it. However scientists are looking for ways to overcome the terrible condition, but no disease-modifying treatments to tackle the most common form of dementia have been discovered.
Alzheimer’s remains the most common form of dementia, and it affects millions of people worldwide, especially elders.
