Grand challenges in dementia 2010

Rodrigo O. Kuljiš

doi:10.3389/fneur.2010.00004

Abstract

Grand challenges in dementia 2010

Highlights

Compounding this staggering challenge, the cause of most of the most common forms of dementia, starting with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), remains unknown (Jellinger 2009; Kuljiš, 2009a)
While there is an increased awareness of the challenges posed by dementia, and agencies such as Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) have been mobilizing for many years to improve still inadequate governmental and private resources for the care of demented patients and their families, conquering these conditions by applications of modern biomedicine remains hampered by the lack of a unifying scheme for their understanding and treatment (Kuljiš, 2009a)
Most attempts to unravel the causes of dementia — and by extension the design of useful treatments and prevention — depend on a rather simplistic, if still somewhat useful model of the brain as a “sick machine” that arose in the 18th Century (La Mettrie, 1748), that has been successful by exploring increasingly “atomizing” reductionist models, in the absence of an successful scheme that allows the wealth of molecular-level observations to be integrated through increasingly higher-scale levels of organization all the way up to the individual patient (Kuljiš, 2009a,b, 2010)

Summary

Introduction

Compounding this staggering challenge, the cause of most of the most common forms of dementia, starting with AD, remains unknown (Jellinger 2009; Kuljiš, 2009a).

Results

Conclusion