Research Paper|Volume 8, Issue 2|pp 304—313

Inhalational Alzheimer's disease: an unrecognized—and treatable—epidemic

Dale E. Bredesen^1,²

¹Easton Laboratories for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, Department of Neurology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
²Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA

Received: October 30, 2015Accepted: February 3, 2016Published: February 10, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Bredesen et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease is one of the most significant healthcare problems today, with a dire need for effective treatment. Identifying subtypes of Alzheimer's disease may aid in the development of therapeutics, and recently three different subtypes have been described: type 1 (inflammatory), type 2 (non-inflammatory or atrophic), and type 3 (cortical). Here I report that type 3 Alzheimer's disease is the result of exposure to specific toxins, and is most commonly inhalational (IAD), a phenotypic manifestation of chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), due to biotoxins such as mycotoxins. The appropriate recognition of IAD as a potentially important pathogenetic condition in patients with cognitive decline offers the opportunity for successful treatment of a large number of patients whose current prognoses, in the absence of accurate diagnosis, are grave.