Introduction to week 3

Welcome to the week 3. Once we have acquired enough knowledge about the nervous system,

we will focus on one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) Probably your current ideas about neurodegenerative deseases come from what you have heard from the media or close experiences. We will go through each disease in a similar way, beginning with a description of the symptoms and progression of the disease

In this case, we will emphasize on the most known alteration associated to AD: dementia. Additionally, we will study whether it is always present in AD patients. Are there people with higher probabilities of suffering from AD? Who are affected by it? These are some of the questions we will answer during this week. Naturally, we will analyze what happens in the brain and where with the progression of the disease. It is also worth reviewing the existing treatments up to now, identifying which tries to stop the disease and which exclusively treats the associated symptoms. We will try to gather information about ‘inclusive’ therapies, also known as alternative therapies.

In this matter, we will inform about which have to be regarded with caution because they have not been endorsed by scientific community. In the end, we would like to tell you this week includes additional information. This material will be available for those who want to deep in pathogenic mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases.

These mechanisms are: Excitotoxicity Protein alteration Inflammation processes Oxidative stress and mitochondrial damage These events occur in all the neurodegenerative diseases with variable relevance. Therefore, it is important to study their role in the progression of the disease, which could be key for developing new therapies. But, this part of the course is not mandatory and is not included for the general evaluation.