With regard to treatment, what are you basing your belief on? Plenty of diseases can be halted or cured with chemicals.
There’s uncertainty as to what protein is responsible for the degenerative effects.[1]
My bias exists for the fact that I believe the cure to Alzheimer’s is removing or preventing the development of this plaque. At least I’ve been lead to believe this is among the most promising cures.[2] Amyloid protein is particularly tricky because it’s insoluble. I don’t think we could develop a purely chemical solution for the fact that it would likely be destructive to our own biology. And I think both gene expression and enzyme production are unlikely to be able to changed with just a drug.
[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326161000.h...
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/tau-protein-not-amyl...
[2] https://rupress.org/jem/article/215/3/927/42616/BACE1-deleti...
Imo Alzheimer's is probably more related to the brain falling into dysdunctional, self reinforcing patterns of synaptic connectivity.
Neural plaques might exacerbate this problem by disrupting connectivity, but clearly the brains of many people with plaques learn to route around this damage to retain functionality.
Any sources for this? I’d be very interested to read the literature on this.
Just a jumping off point review on the weakness of the amyloid theory.
The connectome dysregulation theory is my own, it hasn't appeared in the scientific literature as of yet due to our inability to perform fine mapping of synaptic connections without microtoming a cadaver brain.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191007113314.h...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/colombian-woman-s-ge...