51. Alzheimerʼs Disease

Alzheimerʼ s disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder in late life which is clinically characterized by dementia and progressive cognitive impairments with presently no effective treatment. This chapter summarizes recent progress achieved during the last decades in understanding the pathogenesis of AD. Basing on the pathomorphological hallmarks (senile amyloid plaque deposits, occurance of neurofibrillary tangles as hyperphosphorylated tau protein in cerebral cortex and hippocampus) and other consistent features of the disease (neurodegeneration, cholinergic dysfunction, vascular impairments), the mayor hypotheses of cause and development of the sporadic, not genetically inherited, AD are described. Finally, to reflect the disease in its entirety and internal connective relationships, the different pathogenetic hypotheses are tentatively combined to describe the interplay of the essential features of AD and their mutually influencing pathogenetic processes in a unified model. Such a unified approach may provide a basis to model pathogenesis and progression of AD by application of computational methods such as the recently introduced novel research framework for building probabilistic computational neurogenetic models (pCNGM) by Kasabov and coworkers [51.1].