Alzheimer's Disease-How Its Bacterial Cause Was Found and Then Discarded

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"The author is an internist and a medical researcher, and his double mastery of both the scientific minutiae and historical nuances of his subject matter is breathtaking. This is more than an account of a scientific debate-it's also an examination of the sometimes-unempirical way that such debate proceeds, as it's conducted by human beings with agendas of their own. Although it's a relatively short book-less than 200 pages of text-it is by no means a quick read. Nevertheless, readers with strong science backgrounds will be impressed by the author's undeniable competence, as well as his journalistic approach to chartering the evolution of thought regarding one of our era's most challenging diseases."

Every seventy-two seconds someone in America develops Alzheimer's disease (AD). And it has been said that almost everyone living long enough will eventually show evidence of Alzheimer's disease. Thus far its cause has remained elusive.

Nevertheless, recently, study after study, in which scientists have injected human Alzheimer diseased brain tissue into mice and other laboratory animals that later developed the disease have left little doubt that Alzheimer's arises from an infectious process-the focus of debate seeming to be which particular disease. And clearly, whatever the infectious cause behind Alzheimer's is, it must be a disease that is not only statistically widespread in the world today, but that was also prevalent at the time of Dr. Alzheimer.

To be sure, it was German neuropathologist Oskar Fischer of the Prague school of neuropathology, Alzheimer's great rival, who was the first to suggest that infection might be causative for Alzheimer's. Fischer's credentials: he was the co-discoverer of Alzheimer's disease and tirelessly did autopsies on the brains of patients with Alzheimer's.

Fischer's infectious view never gained immediate popularity, although today, more than a century later, a volume of data supporting such an approach has begun to accumulate. But was Fischer's specific microbe on the right track to discovering the cause of Alzheimer's to begin with? The evidence uncovered in this book seems to suggest that he was considerably closer than anyone else-either then or since.

Now, internal medicine doctor and researcher Lawrence Broxmeyer, MD, takes readers on a journey back to the time of Dr. Alzheimer and his peers. Well-researched and documented, this important work explores a plausible, but overlooked, hypothesis about the etiology of this debilitating and widespread condition-and brings new information to the discussion about how to prevent a disease affecting millions of Americans today.

So let us review that evidence.