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Epilogue: Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Alzheimer's Disease‐Challenges, Caveats, and Parameters
Author(s) -
KHACHATURIAN ZAVEN S.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2000.tb05577.x
Subject(s) - disease , phenotype , neuroscience , task (project management) , alzheimer's disease , orthodoxy , clinical phenotype , psychology , medicine , biology , genetics , pathology , philosophy , gene , theology , management , economics
A bstract : The task of developing a unifying theory of Alzheimer's disease faces several impediments. The most difficult include: the impact of scientific orthodoxy on the acceptance of new ideas; the uncertain relationship between aging and disease(s); the long time course of the degenerative process; the heterogeneity in the genotype and phenotype of the disease; the complex interactions among genetic and other risk factors (many of which are not yet known); the poorly understood nonlinear relationships between the neurobiological and the clinical phenotypes of the disease‐namely, viewing clinical symptoms as emergent behavior(s) of a complex system; and the paucity of appropriate models or modeling systems for human disease(s) such as Alzheimer's.