When Alois Alzheimer first identified this memory-destroying disorder in 1907, his patient was a 50-year-old woman; a very early age, as researchers now know, for most Alzheimer cases to appear. "The disease was largely ignored because it was considered to be presenile dementia," says Davies, the Resnick professor of AD research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. "Nobody paid attention to rarer patients."
Today, with some 80 AD-related papers published weekly, the research is no longer rare. Says Zaven S. Khachaturian, who launched the Dementias of Aging and Neuroscience and Neuropsychology programs at the National Institute on Aging in the late 1970s, "I don't think any of us envisioned how large [the field] was going to get." Two reasons for this growth are the work of people such as Davies, whose research on acetylcholine provided a scientific basis to support further investigations, and the amount of funding that ...
