Question: Why do people get Dementia and Alzheimer's disease??

Richard Unwin answered on 17 Nov 2015:

Hi Megan,
Welcome back!
This is a great question, and one we don’t really know the answer to. dementia is the name for a group of disease with cause the brain to function poorly. the most common form is Alzheimer’s Disease (along with Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and Fronto-temporal dementia and MND, among others). These are all caused by different things and affect different part of the brain. In Alzheimer’s, you tend to see memory loss as the first major symptom. We don’t know what the trigger is, but we think that an important feature is the presence of small insoluble protein deposits (called ‘plaques’) in the brain. these can be toxic to brain cells, and can trigger a series of other events in the brain that seem to make the disease worse. The protein in these plaques (called amyloid beta) is make naturally by cells in the brain in everybody but usually gets chopped up or made safe – nobody knows why in some people they start to build up. Stopping the brain from making amyloid beta is something people are looking at as a treatment for Alzheimer’s. We are currently working on a medicine that stops the amyloid beta making these plaques.