New Diagnostic Criteria for Alzheimer‘s Disease

Abstract

More than 100 years ago, Alois Alzheimer described the clinical presentation and neu‐ ropathological changes, including neuronal loss, extracellular plaques and intraneuronal tangles, in a single patient with the disease that now bears his name [1]. Over the years, it became clear that the pathological character‐ istics of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were com‐ mon in individuals who died demented. The finding of a correlation between plaque counts and dementia severity put great focus on the involvement of plaques in the disease process [2]. Similar but even stronger correlations were later seen between dementia severity and the number of tangles in the cerebral cortex [3]. However, it took almost 80 years from Alzheimer’s case presentation to reveal the molecular compo‐ sition of plaques and tangles (i.e., aggregated amyloid‐b [Ab] [4,5] and hyperphosphorylated tau proteins [6,7]).