What is it about?
It is time for a new approach to how we prevent and treat cognitive decline and dementia. This requires a deeper understanding of its different forms and causes. The current diagnostic criteria are rather descriptive of symptoms and brain pathologies. This paper is about tackling dementia in a revolutionary manner, i.e., by network medicine, a type of medicine that redefines all diseases by molecular causes, making for the first time precise cure and prevention a possibility, and is now applied to dementia subtypes.
Featured Image
Photo by SOULSANA on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Cognitive decline and dementia are devastating conditions that are predicted to become more and more prevalent as our population ages. Currently, we lack curative treatments, let alone prevention. Network medicine is helping us reveal these causes, develop better diagnostic criteria, identify molecular subtypes of dementia, and develop effective treatments.
Perspectives
The research field of dementia has been caught up for decades in an outdated way of defining its subtypes, one failure after another. We need to focus on precise molecular diagnoses, curative treatments, and prevention.
Mayra Pacheco Pachado
Maastricht University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Re-Addressing Dementia by Network Medicine and Mechanism-Based Molecular Endotypes, Journal of Alzheimer s Disease, October 2023, IOS Press,
DOI: 10.3233/jad-230694.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
