MixedScienceAlzheimer’s hijacks the latter half of the book. While it is probably the disease we fear most as we age, it is not likely more related to aging than are a myriad of diseases, making its emphasis a bit at odds with the book’s objective ... Nonetheless, Armstrong admirably takes a holistic approach to Alzheimer’s, comparing mainstream interventions that largely involve therapies designed to remove plaques and tangles with more controversial strategies that involve multimodal alleviation of risk factors to prevent disease progression. Although the Alzheimer’s story is informative, one cannot help but see this in part as a missed opportunity to better define aging, which is not a set of diseases but rather a set of intrinsic biological processes that together confer systemic changes with age, making us susceptible to disease ... Armstrong lays open the pathways that govern aging and describes some of the approaches to test aging interventions in humans. However, as interest and investments in this field grow, progress in the latter area may move faster than she (or many others) expect.
