The Adult Cognitive Disease Wiki

Alzheimer's is not an event. It is a process in time.

The research corpus behind that idea — one hundred and twenty-three long-form papers and six hundred and thirty-four linked concepts, arranged along the disease's own fifty-year timeline. You don't need to know where to begin: read the one paper that frames it, then walk the timeline.

The lead paper · read this first

The Temporal Architecture of Collapse

One paper frames everything else here. It lays out the three-phase, fifty-year course each other document elaborates: the brainstem eroding decades before symptoms, the mid-life inflammatory turn, and the visible synaptic collapse at the end. Read it once and the rest of the wiki has a shape.

Read the paper →

The fifty-year front · in order

iGroundworkThe substrate beneath every phase23 iiPhase I · age 20–50The locus coeruleus dims16 iiiPhase II · age 50–70The microglial & matrix turn22 ivPhase III · age 70+The synapse fails, visibly16 vConvergence & SynthesisWhere the independent lines meet30

One lesion, a century apart

1907 — today

The oldest idea in this corpus and one of its newest are the same idea. In 1907 Oskar Fischer read the plaque as a process — a lesion growing outward from a dying neuron. A century later two prize entrants re-derived his morphogenesis in molecular terms: amyloid accumulates inside the neuron, and the plaque is the gravestone of a cell killed from within.

1907 · the founder Oskar Fischer The prize's namesake read the plaque as a morphogenetic event with a developmental history. the inside-out plaque Fischer → Gouras → Nixon Amyloid builds inside the neuron years before any plaque; the deposit is a tombstone, not a cause. where it converges The endosomal nexus Retromer failure, lipid peroxidation and autophagic collapse all land in one compartment.

Every stage, in order

All documents →

The full reading sequence — the molecular groundwork, the three clinical phases, then the spread, convergence, synthesis and frontier.

1The Record — Fischer, 1907, and how the field went wrong→ 2Groundwork — the substrate beneath every phase→ 3Phase I — age 20–50, the locus coeruleus, decades before symptoms→ 4Phase II — age 50–70, microglia, the inflammasome, and the matrix→ 5Phase III — age 70+, where the disease finally becomes visible→ 6The Convergence — autophagic collapse and its upstream triggers→ 7The Synthesis — the cross-axis architecture→ 8The Frontier — therapeutics, experiments, and open questions→

Or find your own way in

by concept634 recurring ideasEach concept lists every paper that leans on it. by convergenceThe 7 nodesWhere independent arguments land on one mechanism. by geneThe 200 genes namedLook a gene up by symbol and jump to its papers. the mapThe whole network, drawnEvery paper and concept at once, nodes as hubs. the matrixPhase × lens — every cell a cardThree phases crossed with eight lenses. the censusThe cellular front of failureScrub the disease through its five stations.

A note on this edition

This wiki publishes the science: the papers, the concepts, the convergence nodes and the temporal stages. It withholds the working dossiers on individual researchers, which are graded internal notes — where the text names one, it appears as plain text rather than a link.