Book Review: the alzheimer ccnundrum: entanglements of dementia and aging by Margaret Lock

Despite hundreds of millions of dollars invested in medical research, no effective treatment has been discovered for Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. In this book, Margaret Lock attempts to expose the predicaments embedded in current efforts to slow down or halt Alzheimer’s disease through early detection of presymptomatic biological changes in healthy individuals. This empirical account is a very welcome addition to the literature on biomedical uncertainty and should be read by sociological and anthropological scholars interested in complex neurological disorders, writes Des Fitzgerald.