Attacking Alzheimer's research treatment and diagnosis
Attacking Alzheimer'slatest news on treatment and diagnosis
Christine Larson January 31, 2008
"Though they may live in dread of it, most people will never develop it. "There's a 10 to 15 percent chance, if you live a normal life [span], you'll develop Alzheimer's disease," says Norman Relkin, associate professor of clinical neurology and neuroscience at New York Presbyterian Hospital and Weill Cornell Medical College. (To be sure, the prevalence in people over age 90 rises to nearly 1 in 2.) Relkin suspects the body has natural defenses—and several years ago, he and his colleagues set about finding them...
...By comparing the blood of Alzheimer's patients with that of normal older people, the team discovered that the patients did indeed have lower-than-normal levels of a particular antibody. The researchers administered the antibody—already present in a therapy used to treat immune deficiencies—to a handful of people with Alzheimer's in 2004. A few months later, they were shocked by the improvements in the patients' cognitive function. "The mental scores were increasing by an amount that was equivalent to setting the disease back by a year and a half," Relkin says. Last June, he discovered that the antibodies were ignoring single amyloid molecules and kicking in only to destroy the toxic clumps...
Immunotherapy for Alzheimer's patients is just one of several new directions promising to transform the treatment of Alzheimer's, Relkin says. "We're at a juncture now where we're trying to make the transition from treating symptoms to disease-modifying treatments" that hit at the cause of Alzheimer's...
Until recently, doctors weren't able to say for sure whether someone had Alzheimer's until an autopsy. But the closer science comes to a treatment for Alzheimer's, the more important early detection becomes. The National Institute on Aging is currently sponsoring a study of 800 older people—some cognitively normal, some with Alzheimer's, some with mild cognitive impairment—to uncover early warning signs. Promising techniques include MRIs used to show abnormal shrinking of the brain; pet scans to detect amyloid plaques in the brain or to spot patterns of glucose use associated with Alzheimer's; or spinal taps to look for abnormal concentrations of certain proteins in the cerebrospinal fluid during the early stages of Alzheimer's."
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