In the 1980s, “memory clinics” were set up and are now very widespread. For Martial Van der Linden and Anne-Claude Juillerat, this is the armed wing of the approach they are condemning. Why? Initially, these clinics helped recruiting patients with a view to participating in pharmacological trials aimed at testing the first drugs meant to treat Alzheimer’s. “The second stage consisted of prescribing drugs despite the fact that they had no proven efficacy (and still don't) ", points out Martial Van der Linden. “Then came the third stage, where the concept of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) was created in order to widen the field of disorders to include people suffering from mild cognitive problems (mnesic in particular).”

In the past, these minor deficits were attributed to old age. Then they became potential warning signs of a pejorative evolution towards Alzheimer’s disease. “But what is the situation in reality?” says Martial Van der Linden. “The memory functions of the large majority of people who perform badly in a memory test will remain stable or improve.  Only a minority will go onto experience serious cognitive problems.”

According to the authors of Penser autrement le vieillissement, a fourth stage was recently undertaken: the search for Alzheimer’s disease despite a lack of symptoms. To put it plainly, lumbar punctures or amyloid-β positron emission tomography (PET) scans are used to detect the possible presence of amyloid deposits, which are considered as one of the two histological signatures of Alzheimer’s disease. Following in the footsteps of Peter Whitehouse and Daniel George, Martial Van der Linden and Anne-Claude Juillerat point a finger at the pharmaceutical industry, which endeavours to make every effort to present Alzheimer’s "as an ‘epidemic’ we must fight and overcome (cure) at all costs". Apart from the fact that the efficacy of the – purely symptomatic - drugs offered today is highly debatable.

A confusion of symptoms

This therapeutic failure should come as no surprise to the supporters of the countertrend, since they consider it utopian to believe that a drug capable of curing Alzheimer’s can be found. And with good reason! This disease has no specific origin and should be reintegrated into the framework of general aging whose bases are, on the contrary, multifactorial. “We need to put an end to the myth of immortality”, Professor Van der Linden adds. “Cerebral aging is part of the human adventure and the reasons why some people age less well or more quickly than others depends on a whole range of factors and mechanisms that come into play throughout our lives."

So what arguments have led Martial Van der Linden and Anne-Claude Juillerat to suggest that the condition known as Alzheimer’s disease isn’t a homogenous entity that is different from normal aging, but rather the reflection of an exacerbation of the latter? First of all, referring to recent studies, they assert that there are no cognitive symptoms specific to Alzheimer’s disease. Indeed, experts asked by the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institutes of Health to review the disease’s criteria, or supposed disease, conclude that there is a diversity of expressions on a cognitive level. In short, besides (sometimes very discreet) memory deficits, the traditional pillar of the diagnosis, those concerned may present a wide variety of cognitive problems (speech, attention, spatial perception, etc.). Their problems may evolve very differently in each case, sometimes even stabilising or improving (including on a cerebral level), without the help of ‘anti-Alzheimer’ drugs.

Second argument: the absence of biological markers strictly associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The two histological signatures that supposedly characterise it (amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles) aren’t particular to it. They can also be found in clinical pictures commonly considered as typical of frontotemporal dementia or Lewy body dementia, for example, while various types of abnormalities observed in these hypothetical entities are present in the brain of people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.