Abstract

A frail patient is one who carries a sum of poly-pathologies, whose co-existence may shorten his life expectation. Diabetes mellitus type 2 and metabolic syndrome play a substantial role in it, but dementia has increasingly risen in importance. Interestingly, the insulin pathway was suggested to be responsible for the metabolic cascade that leads to amyloid-beta deposit and pathology. Nevertheless, a clear relationship between them was just experimentally, rather than clinically demonstrated. In this work the authors suggest a possible link between insulin, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease, whose co-existence could be responsible for physical and cognitive decline but not for frailty. We suggest that these factors could be responsible for frailty only if senescence-associated.

Keywords: Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes mellitus type 2, insulin, amyloid β-peptide42, tau.