A Discussion and analysis of three possible causes of Alzheimer’s Disease

Read a newspaper, ANY newspaper, and you will come across medical technologies such as reduction in infant mortality, development of vaccines and antibodies, and advances in the treatment of heart disease and stroke that have contributed to the recent increase in life expectancy. In 1900 the average life expectancy in the US was about 50 years and now it has risen to 73 years for men and 78 years for women 1.What does this mean in terms of quality of life? It means that with this increase in life expectancy, new epidemics such as dementia (deterioration of mental function) have been unmasked. The goal of the recent research on aging is to increase the quality of life and find the cause and a possible treatment for these new epidemics.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia in the elderly and denotes about 70% of all dementia cases 1. It causes more than 100,000 deaths each year and is the fourth leading cause of death after heart disease, cancer and stroke

[...] Researchers have proposed head injuries and HSV1 viruses as possible environmental factors and have also noticed a correlation between these two environmental factors and the e4 allele of the APOE gene. While HSV1 and head injuries alone account for some AD cases, when correlated with e4 allele, there seems to be more AD cases that fall into this category. Thus, the interaction between environmental factors (head injuries and HSV1 virus) and genetic factors (e4 allele of the APOE gene) seem to explain more AD cases more than any of these factors alone. [...]

[...] The focus of this paper will be to analyze three other possible environmental factors (in addition to the genetic factors) in the etiology (cause) of Alzheimer's Disease: head traumas; viruses (HSV1); and aluminum. It is especially interesting to look at the interaction of these environmental factors and genetic factors in contributing to AD. Genetics has been the main focus of research in the study of the disease of Alzheimer because it has been thought to be the main cause of Alzheimer's diseases (AD). [...]

[...] About a year later, Lin and colleagues took another look at a second strain of herpes virus, varicella zoster (VZV) that also resides in the peripheral nervous system of most humans 9. They ran the same methods as above, but found no VZV DNA in the samples of 17 patients with Alzheimer's Disease 9. Although it was interested to research other viruses that might also be playing a role in the etiology of AD, Lin an colleagues' finding revealed nothing new about the etiology of AD. [...]