Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, along with a team of nearly 100 scientists, have discovered that Alzheimer’s disease appears to progress in two distinct phases. Their study of 84 cadaver brains revealed that an early phase involves a slow increase in pathology, followed by a rapid, exponential decline.
The findings suggest that Alzheimer’s treatments are most likely to help early in the disease, and that one strategy might be to protect vulnerable inhibitory neurons.
The results also show how scientists’ understanding of Alzheimer’s is being changed by new tools and techniques that can reveal detailed information about millions of individual brain cells.