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A tale of two diseases: Aging HIV patients inspire a closer look at Alzheimer's disease

Nature Medicine volume 24, pages 376–377 (2018)Cite this article

This possible connection began to interest memory specialist Scott Turner when he met with a 71-year-old HIV-positive attorney in the Washington, DC, area four years ago. The patient reached out to Turner and complained that he had decided to retire because of his inability to remember details of his legal cases well enough. The man's regular physician had attributed the memory problems to a mild form of HAND, but to Turner, it seemed more serious. “This person had to stop working,” says Turner, director of Georgetown University's Memory Disorders Program. “If someone had to stop working, I would not call that mild.”

The patient came to Turner searching for the true culprit behind the memory problems, but, “I just felt kind of stupid, really, not being able to give him an answer,” Turner recalls. He decided to test his patient for a peptide called amyloid-beta, whose aberrant accumulation is the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Turner suggested using positron-emission tomography (PET) scans to check for the protein in the man's brain. The scans confirmed a significant presence of amyloid-beta. “It wasn't just subtle or borderline,” Turner says, adding that the significant amount of amyloid meant that the test was “clearly positive” for Alzheimer's disease. Turner published his findings in 2016 and believes that his is the first published report of a person with both HIV and Alzheimer's disease pathology1.

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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar is Nature Medicine's associate news editor in Boston.

    • Shraddha Chakradhar
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  1. Shraddha Chakradhar
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Chakradhar, S. A tale of two diseases: Aging HIV patients inspire a closer look at Alzheimer's disease. Nat Med 24, 376–377 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nm0418-376

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