Early-onset AD – a call for clinical trial inclusion

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a significant public health
burden and has huge devastating effects at an individual level. For over two
decades, an arbitrarycut-off of age of 65 yearshas been
used to distinguish between the two phenotypes ofearly and late-onset AD and since the majority
of Alzheimer’s disease patients develop late-onset AD, most clinical trials address
this population, resulting in many of those with early-onset AD being excluded.

In areviewarticle recently published inAlzheimer’s Research & Therapyas
part of a new review series onearly-onset dementia, Kinga Szigeti and Rachelle
Doody discuss whether early-onset AD patients should be included in clinical
trials. Despite the fact that heritability in early-onset AD is higher than in
late-onset AD, the authors put forward the notion that actively enrolling
early-onset AD patients into clinical trials would actually be of benefit to
the research community. Among other things, they argue that it is unethical to
exclude early-onset AD patients from clinical trials and critically, that
transgenic animal models are based on theamyloid hypothesis, the
pathomechanism广泛认为是responsible for early-onset AD and emphasise that it would make sense for this population to participate in trials.

Further review articles in this series will be published
over the coming months and other series published inAlzheimer’s Research & Therapyare available to viewhere.Alzheimer’s
Research & Therapy
considers basic research with a translational focus,
including research submissions on early-onset AD. For further information about how tosubmityour own work, please see theinstructions for
authors
or contact theeditorial team.

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