Why it should be "Alzheimer disease" rather than "Alzheimer's disease"

TL;DR

This paper argues that using 'Alzheimer disease' instead of 'Alzheimer's disease' improves clarity and consistency in medical literature.

Contribution

The paper provides historical and empirical evidence for replacing the possessive eponym with the non-possessive form in medical terminology.

Findings

The possessive form 'Alzheimer's disease' has dominated the literature for decades.

Searches using 'Alzheimer's disease' and 'Alzheimer disease' yield partially overlapping results in PubMed.

Adopting 'Alzheimer disease' improves literature retrieval completeness and terminological consistency.

Abstract

The terms "Alzheimer's disease" and "Alzheimer disease" are often used
interchangeably in the biomedical literature. Yet this seemingly minor
grammatical difference carries implications that extend beyond style: the
possessive form, marked by the 's eponym, may imply ownership of a disease by an
individual, a notion discouraged by several authoritative medical style guides
and international health organizations [1]. In this article, we examine the historical emergence of the term
"Alzheimer's disease", analyze the trajectories of the possessive and
non-possessive eponyms in PubMed-indexed article titles from 1950 to 2025, and
assess how the choice of terminology influences literature retrieval. Our
analysis indicates that the possessive form has overwhelmingly dominated the
literature for decades. However, searches using "Alzheimer's disease" or
"Alzheimer disease" retrieve non-identical, only partially overlapping sets of
records in PubMed. We argue that adopting the non-possessive form "Alzheimer
disease" would improve conceptual clarity, terminological consistency, and the
completeness of literature retrieval, particularly in systematic reviews and
meta-analyses.

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