Alzheimer's disease remains in 2012 a real public health issue. This neurodegenerative disease is the focal point of many scientific research projects regarding its physiopathological, neuropsychological, imaging or therapeutic aspects, both in animal or human models. Neuroscience has been trying for decades to understand the mechanisms of its origin and evolution, in order to slow down, at the earliest stages possible, the resulting cognitive and behavioral impairment as well as the autonomy loss. Thanks to numerous technological progresses, in particular in neuroimaging, clinicians and researchers have at their disposal more and more performing tools to help diagnosis and enlarge our knowledge about the disease. In a first part, we will see how, using combined clinical anatomical and biological markers, we can better define a population of patients affected by sporadic prodromal Alzheimer's disease, and how those markers enable us to go ahead with the understanding of the physiopathological processes causing the disease. We will then address, in a second part, the genetic aspect of Alzheimer's disease, through two clinical cases. Finally, we will see how, by means of a study upon visual information processing, we can try to better assess some of the cerebral dysfunctions that involve early affected regions, with the purpose of a better knowledge of the impaired neuronal networks.
