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Prions are exactly the tiny, hard to detect things that could make Alzheimers transmissible. There are likely to remain many questions to resolve, but this sure suggests a line of inquiry: Is Alzheimer's one distinct disease? Can a prion be isolated as the cause? Can a diagnostic test be designed that detects this prion? Etc.

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Have they found prions in Alzheimers patients universally? That would seem to have come up looooong ago given how much it has been studied.

There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins.

It could just as easily be viral or bacterial infection. Classically, people always just assumed that brains had no such infections. Until somebody checked, and they turn out to be very common.

But they still don't look for infections in Alzheimer's patients' brains, probably because it would make them seem negligent. (Which they are.)

> There is no reason to assume this is a matter of proteins.

Except that there's increasing evidence that specific proteins do in fact play a part in various forms of dementia.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4072215/

It is possible that Alzheimer's is purely a matter of aberrant proteins. That would be valid conclusion if the evidence turned out to support it. But it is not a valid assumption under any circumstance.

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