Suzanne de la Monte, MD, MPH, professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, chief of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Providence VA Medical Center, and a medical staff member at Rhode Island Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. 

A “physician scientist,” Dr. Suzanne de la Monte has found a link between Alzheimer’s and insulin resistance (which can lead to diabetes) in the brain. She says her research suggests that to discover a cause and a cure for Alzheimer’s, researchers should be “studying the whole body.”

De la Monte is a professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Neurology, and Neurosurgery at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, chief of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Providence VA Medical Center, and a medical staff member at Rhode Island Hospital and Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island. 

There is no known cure for Alzheimer’s, though the disease afflicts 6.2 million Americans over the age of 65. By 2050, the number is projected to rise to nearly 13 million. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, there is no single cause for the disease, which destroys nerve cells in the brain and their ability to communicate. Similarly, type 2 diabetes, defined as the body’s inability to regulate and use sugar, can result in the death of cells when they are unable to get the nutrients they need.

“The trends in diabetes and the trends in Alzheimer’s, they’re amazingly parallel,” says de la Monte.

This is why she calls Alzheimer’s “type 3 diabetes.” In a paper published in 2006, de la Monte coined the term after she and her team stumbled upon what has become the central focus of her research.

“I was looking at it, and I almost dropped,” she says, recalling the day she found the abnormalities that those in the scientific and medical community, even herself, hadn’t seen before. She repeated experiments over and over before publishing the paper that would change the course of her research. “We made really obese mice. We gave them a high-fat diet and they got diabetic fatty liver disease, and indeed, they got cognitive impairment and they got brain damage,” she explains.

De la Monte says the experiments in mice that suggested a connection between dementia and diabetes led her to study the blood of humans with Alzheimer’s. 

“We looked at the serum of people who have Alzheimer’s, and no diagnosed diabetes,” she says. “And, when you look at their blood, you can find the same early inflammatory markers, some insulin resistance markers. … They really do have something systematically wrong that happens early. That’s what gives me confidence that we’re dealing with a disease for which we need to pay attention to the full body.”

And that’s exactly what de la Monte is working on right now. She is studying the communication between the brain and the body, especially with respect to how the brain informs the body that there’s something physically wrong.