Alzheimer’s manifests as a disease of the elderly, but like heart disease and most cancers, it’s a disease that may take decades to develop. Most Alzheimer’s sufferers aren’t diagnosed until they’re in their seventies,5059 but we now know that their brains began deteriorating long before that. Based on thousands of autopsies, pathologists seemed to detect the first silent stages of Alzheimer’s disease—what appear to be tangles in the brain—in half of people by age fifty and even 10 percent of those in their twenties.5060 The good news is that the clinical manifestation of Alzheimer’s disease
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