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P4–406: Systems medicine: A new model for dementia research?
Author(s) -
Llewellyn David,
Lang Iain,
Bates Declan
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
alzheimer's and dementia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.713
H-Index - 118
eISSN - 1552-5279
pISSN - 1552-5260
DOI - 10.1016/j.jalz.2013.08.239
Subject(s) - dementia , reductionism , context (archaeology) , disease , clinical trial , intervention (counseling) , systematic review , psychology , medicine , intensive care medicine , neuroscience , management science , computer science , psychiatry , medline , biology , pathology , epistemology , paleontology , philosophy , biochemistry , economics
Previous dementia research has generally targeted neurodegenerative pathways whilst adopting a reductionist approach. There is however a growing realization that (a) reductionism has not yet yielded disease modifying treatments for dementia, (b) a mixture of vascular and neurodegenerative pathologies, which may interact, are implicated in many cases, (c) the etiology of dementia is complex reflecting multiple risk factors which may also interact during an extended preclinical period, and (d) vascular pathologies may be more amenable to intervention.1, 2 Systems medicine has been developed as an alternative to reductionism in which networks as a whole possess emergent dynamic properties which can be modeled in time, space and context using mathematical and computational techniques (see Figure 1).3, 4