Will There Ever Be A Succesful Treatment for Alzheimer's Disease

Lane Simonian

Some important findings about Alzheimer's disease came out from MIT and Harvard scientists recently that can be encapsulated in the following quotes:

“One possibility is that maybe there’s more than one cause of Alzheimer’s, and that even in a single person, there could be multiple contributing factors,” Fraenkel said.

“All the evidence that we have indicates that there are many different pathways involved in the progression of Alzheimer’s. It is multifactorial, and that may be why it’s been so hard to develop effective drugs,” says Ernest Fraenkel, professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study. “We will need some kind of combination of treatments that hit different parts of this disease.”

There are multiple factors that can lead to Alzheimer's disease. They include a diet high in sugar and other carbohydrates, salt, and high fructose corn syrup, environmental toxins (air pollution, heavy metals, pesticides and herbicides, industrial solvents, for instance), stress, certain chronic infections, genetic mutations and specific genes, diabetes and prediabetes, and potentially certain medications. If a person has only one of these factors than addressing this factor may prevent Alzheimer's disease, but usually they have at least one of these factors so at best you may delay onset by addressing one of these factor.

https://www.masslive.com/news/2025/05/mit-harvard-scientists-make-important-breakthrough-in-alzheimers-research.html

There is basically one pathway leading to Alzheimer's disease which is well-represented in the following chart. There are though multiple points in this pathway and most drugs developed for Alzheimer's disease either address a triggering factor or one of these points. Again this at best only slows down the onset and/or the progression of the disease.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncel.2015.00091/full (figure three, ONOO- is peroxynitrite)

The key to treating Alzheimer's disease is likely the following:

"The inflammatory mediator peroxynitrite, when generated in excess, may damage cells by oxidizing and nitrating cellular components. Defense against this reactive species may be at the level of prevention of the formation of peroxynitrite, at the level of interception, or at the level of repair of damage caused by peroxynitrite."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378427402005118

Aromatherapy with essential oils high in eugenol (rosemary, lemon balm, and bay laurel, for instance) and panax ginseng do all three. That is why the preclinical evidence and clinical trials have indicated that they may be (or are) effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease (with relatively few side effects in most cases).