Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 18 pp 17815—17844
Alzheimer’s disease as a systems network disorder: chronic stress/dyshomeostasis, innate immunity, and genetics
- 1 Department of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
- 2 Department of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
- 3 Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
Received: May 16, 2020 Accepted: July 25, 2020 Published: September 21, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103883How to Cite
Copyright: © 2020 Kurakin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Ineffective results of clinical trials of over 200 anti-Alzheimer's drug candidates, with a 99.6% attrition rate, suggest that the current paradigm of Alzheimer's disease (AD) may be incomplete, necessitating exploration of alternative and complementary frameworks.
Using algorithms for hypothesis independent search and expert-assisted synthesis of heterogeneous data, we attempted to reconcile multimodal clinical profiles of early-stage AD patients and accumulated research data within a parsimonious framework. Results of our analysis suggest that Alzheimer’s may not be a brain disease but a progressive system-level network disorder, which is driven by chronic network stress and dyshomeostasis. The latter can be caused by various endogenous and exogenous factors, such as chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, vascular dysfunction, head trauma, environmental toxicity, and immune disorders. Whether originating in the brain or on the periphery, chronic stress, toxicity, and inflammation are communicated to the central nervous system (CNS) via humoral and neural routes, preferentially targeting high-centrality regulatory nodes and circuits of the nervous system, and eventually manifesting as a neurodegenerative CNS disease.
In this report, we outline an alternative perspective on AD as a systems network disorder and discuss biochemical and genetic evidence suggesting the central role of chronic tissue injury/dyshomeostasis, innate immune reactivity, and inflammation in the etiopathobiology of Alzheimer’s disease.