What is the molecular pathology that underlies hippocampal memory decline?

Over a century ago Alois Alzheimer described the importance of neurofibrillary tangles in a woman who died with dementia at the age of 55 years; plaques having already been observed in brains by Blocq and Marinesco. In the 1960s, Martin Roth and colleagues at Newcastle started to look at the pathological basis of dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and identified neuritic plaques and tangles as the key determinants of clinical dementia. Although recent advances have since established the molecular basis for the pathological hallmarks of the disease, several studies have been contradictory in terms of whether it is amyloid or …