Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast. Each episode, we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics. I'm Susan Vallett. After decades in the shadow of the reigning model for Alzheimer's disease, alternative explanations are finally getting the attention they deserve.

That's next in the first of our two episodes about Alzheimer's disease.

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It's often subtle at first. A lost phone, a forgotten word, a missed appointment. By the time a person

walks into a doctor's office worried about signs of

forgetfulness or failing cognition, the changes to their brain have been long underway,

changes that we don't yet know how to stop or reverse. Alzheimer's disease, the most common form

of dementia, has no cure.

Riddhi Patira is a behavioral neurologist in Pennsylvania who specializes in neurodegenerative diseases like dementia.

Memory is fascinating. What makes us humanist memory, dealing with these patients can be very mentally taxing every everyday basis because it's not much you can do.

There is no effective treatment.

It's more medicines.

It's really a lot of time.

Supportive counseling, education, what to do, still give some hope but realistic hope.

Three decades ago, scientists thought they had cracked the medical mystery of what causes

Alzheimer's disease, with an idea known as the amyloid cascade hypothesis. It accused a protein called

amyloid beta of forming sticky toxic plaques between neurons, killing them and triggering a series of events that made

the brain waste away. The amyloid cascade hypothesis was simple. Scott Small is the director

of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University. The pharmaceutical industry,

...