A Roller Coaster Year for Alzheimer's Treatment

Roughly 5.7 million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, the neurodegenerative disease that slowly deteriorates memory and other cognitive abilities. For more than 25 years, many experts have pushed beta-amyloid, a protein fragment that builds up in the brain in plaques, as one of the main suspects behind the disease. Pharmaceutical companies are chasing beta-amyloid hard, racing to develop drugs to fight plaque buildup and hopefully, in turn, improve patients’ brain function. But 2018 was a mixed bag for those potential treatments.