As noted above, one source of disagreement in research efforts to evaluate alcohol use as a potential risk factor for AD is the lack of standardized diagnostic and research criteria (Piazza-Gardner et al., 2013). Alzheimer’s disease was originally defined as a clinical syndrome with postmortem neuropathologic verification. In 2018, the NIA and the Alzheimer’s Association (AA) jointly developed the NIA-AA Research Framework for understanding AD as an aggregate neuropathology defined by specific biomarkers in combination with postmortem examination (Jack et al., 2018). Adhering to an AT(N) rubric, it was recommended that AD research should evaluate: Aβ pathology (A); Tau pathology (T); and neurodegeneration (N) with specific biomarker combinations indicating disease state (Table 2).
