Challenges in Early Diagnosis and Treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract

At present, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has become a hot topic in biology, medicines and other fields. It is a neurodegenerative disorder which is one of the main causes of dementia globally, and population of AD patients is predicted to continue increasing, leading to heavy burden on both health care resource and financial cost. There are numerous new research results considered potentially contribute to new diagnosis or treatment methods of AD annually, but it still lacks a treatment to completely cure this disease, and even though the biomarkers of AD can be detected in the preclinical stage which is more than 10 years early than onset clinical symptoms appear, most of patients are diagnosed after they have cognitive impairments and other symptoms. It still needs to solve challenges on different aspects to find more effective diagnosis methods and treatments. This review briefly summarizes the challenges in early diagnosis and treatment of AD occurring in research or clinical practice in recent years and analysis the reasons and potential study directions of solving these challenges, aiming to give suggestions to help further research.