Second patient benefits from pioneering helmet (From The Northern Echo): "A NORTH-EAST inventor has revealed that a second US patient is benefiting from a prototype antidementia device.
Earlier this year, The Northern Echo exclusively reported that County Durham GP-turned inventor Dr Gordon Dougal had developed a light-emitting helmet which he is convinced can help combat dementia. . . .
Dr Dougal said the unnamed 58 year old American, who is also a university lecturer, got in touch with him after reading about his invention.
In June, Dr Dougal flew to New York to meet the man and agreed to provide him with a second prototype helmet. “He noticed his memory was declining and asked if I could help. I met him in New York, dropped off a helmet and it has worked for him,” said Dr Dougal.
“He has been using it for about six weeks.
“His principle problem is his memory and the helmet has had a positive effect,” said Dr Dougal, who says that the 700 light-emitting diodes in the helmet will help to hold dementia in check and even partially reverse the condition."
The part that perhaps raises most hope and confidence is at the end of the article...
"An early invention by Dr Dougal, which uses the same wavelength of light to heal cold sores, has been approved for use by the NHS."
Sunday Herald: Life: People, Lifestyles & Living Today:
"Dementia has ceased to be a condition that is hidden away in the family closet. Former prime minister Margaret Thatcher's descent into forgetfulness has been publicly charted by her daughter, while Terry Pratchett has described his own as an 'embuggerance' but carried on writing. We also live in an era when all aspects of ageing are considered worth fighting.
Does this mean we are any closer to real hope for sufferers? For Jean Rankin, now entering the severe stages of the disease, perhaps not. The carers at her day centre recently told her daughter she was losing more of her personal skills. Her independent life at her Falkirk home is 'hanging by a thread'. The future for her is only further deterioration.
But there is hope. Ongoing research at the University of Aberdeen by Professor Claude Wischik and his company TauRx suggests that within five years a drug that stems the development of the disease may be on the market. Currently undergoing trials, the drug - remberTM - has so far been found to reduce memory loss by 80%. Effectively, it is halting the progress of the condition. What is remarkable about remberTM is that it came from left-field. Most other scientists had been pursuing the theory that the culprit - and, therefore the target for drugs - was protein deposits in the brain called 'amyloid plaques'. Meanwhile, Wischik had been examining another set of protein formations known as 'tau tangles'. He believed that if those tangles could be broken down, the disease could be halted....
Alzheimer's lies at the centre of a battle for the human mind that raged throughout the 20th century. Roth played a role in this fight. Wischik credits him with having "guided a generation of psychiatrists through a period of post-Freudian thought into the age of drugs, when psychiatry understands mental illness biologically".
But the battle began long before Roth - in 1910, just nine years after a woman in her 40s arrived at the Frankfurt Mental Institute exhibiting many of the symptoms associated with what was then called senile dementia. Auguste D, as she was called, had memory loss and delusions. She was in the habit of dragging sheets about her house and would scream for hours during the night. Her doctor, Alois Alzheimer, asked her to write her name, and she would start, then seemingly forget, and say: "I have lost myself."
When she died in 1906, Alzheimer studied her brain and published a paper outlining his findings of plaques and fibrules and their connection with the condition. He made no attempt to suggest this was his own discovery, or indeed anything new in the investigation of dementia. It was his co-worker, Emil Kraepelin - now widely considered the father of modern scientific psychiatry - who, in his 1910 book, Psychiatrie, identified Alzheimer's disease. He cited it as proof, in his battle against the Freudians, that mental illness could be caused by physical changes.
Few nowadays dispute that Alzheimer's is an organic disease. In the past 30 years the battle for a cure has switched from Freud versus Kraepelin to tau versus amyloid ß , the "tauists" versus the "ßaptists". In his dogged adherence to tau, Wischik was pushing against the scientific grain that amyloid was the key....
One of the surprises about remberTM is that it looks as though it may work at almost all stages of the disease. Given this, it could function, like statins, as a preventative. It could halt the development of the tau tangles long before there are any symptoms.
Does Wischik foresee a future in which everyone over 60 will begin popping these pills with their muesli? No. Rather, he hopes that, using diagnostic tests he is developing, those who need the drug will be identified and targeted. The potential market is huge. Wischik's research suggests that more people than were previously realised currently have undetected Alzheimer-type patterns in their brains. He recognises six stages of deterioration. By stage two there is a small amount of memory loss. A person gets demented "somewhere between stage two and stage four". Of the 10m over-65s in Britain, he notes, 6m are at stage two or beyond. "That," he says, "funnels down to about a million who have full-blown Alzheimer's, and even that, I think, is an underestimate."
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