ABSTRACT
Alzheimer disease (AD), the most common dementia, is a chronic, progressive and neuro-degenerative disorder. With an increasing prevalence, AD has been the third cause of death after cardio-vascular diseases and cancer in the elderly population. However, the pathogenesis of AD remains unclear, which has led to a fairly slow development of drugs for AD and a dim view of future treatments of AD. It has been a hot spot and a big challenge to develop effective, therapeutic drugs for AD. Recently, this topic was discussed via WeChat by experts from the Neuropsychiatric WeChat Group, which consists of 300 Chinese-origin neuroscientists and neuropsychiatrists in China or overseas. The experts pointed out the problems that might have misled researches on drug discovery, such as the misleading but dominating AD pathology hypotheses and problems with the platforms for drug screening. Therefore, it is important to review the pathology of AD and the treatment strategies from big data and the overall view of the disease, which may shed new light on AD therapy to develop drugs for multiple targets, leading to omni-direc-tional, comprehensive treatments of AD. The development of AD can be further classified into different stages based on the upstream factors of AD pathology. Interestingly, it has been found that the AD brain has mitochondria damage and dysfunction; long-term exposure to low doses of ionizing radiation can also cause AD-like pathological changes. These provide novel views and ideas in terms of the path-ological process and preventive and therapeutic strategies for AD.