Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, in which people become forgetful and confused, usually starting in older age. People with Alzheimer’s have a build-up of two kinds of protein clumps in the brain: amyloid and tau. These seem to start forming in our memory centres, two small curved structures on either side of the head called the hippocampi, before spreading all over the brain. For a long time, we thought that these proteins, particularly amyloid, were the root cause of...