Alzheimer’s Could Be Caused by Disruptions to the Brain’s Energy Supply

Drug treatments look to undo the damage of plaques that infect neurons, but new insights support alternative treatments

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It is well known that Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, involves the accumulation of sticky proteins (plaques and tangles) in the brain. But we still don’t know what the root cause of the disease is. Given that someone, somewhere in the world, is diagnosed with dementia every three seconds, there is an urgent race to discover the causes of the disease so that treatments can be developed.

Scientists know that changes to the brain’s blood flow happen before plaques and tangles appear, and this has led to an interesting theory about the causes of the disease, known as the vascular hypothesis.