On November 3, 1906, a clinical psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, Alois
Alzheimer, reported “A peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral
cortex” to the 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists in
Tubingen, He described a 50-year-old woman whom he had followed from her
admission for paranoia, progressive sleep and memory disturbance,
aggression, and confusion, until her death 5 years later. His report
noted distinctive plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain
histology. It excited little interest despite an enthusiastic response
from Kraepelin, who promptly included “Alzheimer's disease” in the 3ih
edition of his text Psychiatrie in 1910. Alzheimer published three
further cases in 1909 and a “plaque-only” variant in 1911, which
reexamination of the original specimens in 1993 showed to be a different
stage of the same process, Alzheimer died in 1915, aged 51, soon after
gaining the chair of psychiatry in Breslau, and long before his name
became a household word.
2021:
Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston Massachusetts will soon begin Phase I trials of a nasal vaccine designed to prevent or slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease (AD), a press release said. This is the first occasion when a nasal vaccine is being attempted for the disease, which affects more than six million people in the U.S. alone.
First seen in a patient way back in 1906 by Dr. Alois Alzheimer, the disease is a brain disorder characterized by the presence of clumps (amyloid plaques) and tangled fibers (tau tangles) between nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. Symptoms of the disease, which is usually seen in adults in their 60s, vary from memory issues to vision loss and even impaired reasoning.
The cause of the disease has long been questioned and researchers only recently believed to have come to the root of it.
Research for a cure has been ongoing for decades, however, most
interventions are aimed at reducing the severity of the symptoms. The
vaccine to be trialed aims to change this.
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