Are infections the missing elements in predicting Alzheimer’s disease?

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins many years before its clinical expression. Therefore, an important goal is accurate long‐term prediction, especially for prevention trials and when evaluating the impacts of early intervention. Yet, current efforts still fall short, which is indicative of missing information in the modelling. Recently, the Epstein‐Barr virus has been shown to trigger the development of multiple sclerosis, years after infection. Similarly, some studies have reported odds ratios for AD that were almost as high as age for some chronic infections, such as those caused by either the herpes simplex virus or cytomegalovirus. We aim to review the literature on prediction models to examine whether infection load has been sufficiently studied as an early biomarker of AD.