Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been falsified

is by far the most common cause of dementia, a progressive decline in brain function most common among the elderly. In America more than 6m people live with the disease, at a cost of over $300bn a year. Despite such vast sums, no single cause for Alzheimer’s has yet been identified. With so much at stake, it is striking that a landmark paper in the field of Alzheimer’s research has been accused of containing fabricated data, as reports this week. In 2006 published a study titled “A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory”It described the work of a team including Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota medical school, which backed a theoretical explanation of the origins of the disease known as the “amyloid hypothesis”.