Research design issues: antialuminum drug studies in Alzheimer's disease.

Alzheimer's disease is a common dementia of later life for which no effective treatments are yet available. Aluminum has been implicated in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer's disease, and interventions aimed at preventing aluminum neurotoxicity and clinical deterioration have been proposed. Carefully designed protocols are needed to test the efficacy of antialuminum drugs. Such protocols will need to be quite different from those used to test symptomatic treatments for Alzheimer's disease patients. A number of research design problems are discussed with regard to testing antialuminum drugs in humans.