ABSTRACT
In 1906 the pathologist/psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer reported to a group of German psychiatrists the story of a 55-year-old woman who died after several years of progressive dementia, and in whose brain he had found both senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. Emil Kraepelin applied Alzheimer’s name to the newly described syndrome of dementia-plaques-tangles in the eighth edition of his important text Psychiatrie in 1910. Some cases of clinically typical Alzheimer’s disease are found to have plaques in a concentration consistent with disease but without tangles in the neocortex. The difference between neuron counts in early onset Alzheimer’s disease and age-matched normals is highly significant and very obvious. Silver stains of the Alzheimer neocortex display apparently broken neuritic processes, and this has been recognized for several decades. Since the mid 1980s and the isolation and sequencing of ß-amyloid by G. G. Glenner, the majority of laboratory research on Alzheimer’s disease has centered on the peptide and its precursor protein amyloid precursor protein.
