Bruno Dubois: transforming the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

541 It’s not uncommon to fi nd that medicine runs in families, but in the case of Bruno Dubois the association is a little more extreme. From his father all the way back for fi ve generations, the Dubois family has been associated with medicine. Even more incredibly, each generation has cultivated an interest in the relationship between the brain and behaviour. His great-great-great-grandfather kept up a correspondence with one of the fathers of modern neurology, Duchenne de Boulogne, while his grandfather was trained by Joseph Babinski at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, France, where Dubois and his father both trained, and where Dubois now leads a team at the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM). Far from being boastful when it comes to his rich neurological pedigree, Dubois rather shies away from talking about his family. He’s far more comfortable, and instantly engaging, when he’s talking about the work of his Cognition, Neuroimaging, and Brain Diseases team at the ICM. The team grew at the interface between the departments of neuropsychology and neurochemistry, which were led by Dubois’ two great mentors, Francois Lhermitte and Yves Agid, respectively, with the aim to further our understanding of the role of the frontal lobes in the organisation of the systems that underpin cognition. And what happens when those systems go wrong? Naturally, neurodegenerative diseases are a major focus of the team’s research and of Dubois’ clinical work, and eagle-eyed readers of The Lancet Neurology will probably already have recognised Dubois as an author of several seminal papers that have changed the way Alzheimer’s disease is conceptualised.