Abstract
With prevalence of dementia expected to almost triple over the next 30 years, there has been much research effort aimed at disentangling the complicated three-way relationship between contextual factors associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD), biological manifestations of AD, and its clinical phenotype in hopes of finding effective targets for prevention or intervention. Research has frequently used the cognitive reserve concept, which attempts to capture individual differences stemming from genetic and early- or mid-life contextual factors, to explain what allows some people to maintain cognitive abilities and postpone progression to dementia in the presence of neuropathology substantial enough to suggest otherwise.
What contributes to this "resilience", that is why some successfully cope with progressive neuropathology while others cannot tolerate the same level of neurodegeneration, is not fully understood.