If someone in your family has been afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, you know that a cure can’t come too quickly. This illness not only victimizes those who have developed it, but is devastating to the lives of their family and friends. In the United States, there are about five million people suffering from the disease.
Researchers have been fighting a losing battle for years, but now new developments are giving hope of not just preventing Alzheimer’s, but in some cases reversing its effects.
Your biological clock may hold the key
Sleep disruption is one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, and almost everyone with Alzheimer's has some sleep problems. Proper function of circadian rhythms has been shown to affect everything from sleep to stress reaction, feeding patterns, DNA repair, fertility and even the effectiveness of medications. Molecular clock oscillations decline with age, and finding ways to help maintain or restore them might form the basis for a possible therapy to reduce or prevent associated health problems.
Big pharma weighs in
Love them or hate them, big pharmaceutical companies and the resources they bring to the game might be the best hope for a breakthrough in the prevention of Alzheimer’s. Biogen's BIIB-037 put up results in early stage human trials that are very intriguing to researchers, doctors, and patients. In that phase 1b trial, BIIB-037 succeeded in its mission to destroy amyloid plaque buildups in the brain that many believe may be closely related to Alzheimer's disease. Patients with mild Alzheimer's disease receiving BIIB-037 saw a significant slowing in clinical decline in cognitive function on two key dementia scales. This marked the first time that a drug in clinic has produced both a reduction in overall amyloid plaque levels and a slowing in impairment.
Ultrasound may be the non-invasive treatment option
There are some weaknesses in this study, but results are promising for a non-invasive treatment that might at least slow the spread and offer relief to some patients. There’s more work to be done, but so far this treatment has been successful in opening up the tight junctions between blood vessels in the brain and reducing the number of amyloid-beta plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Detecting Alzheimer’s earlier is now possible
The brain is the least accessible and most challenging organ to study in the human body; as a result, Alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed definitively only by examining brain tissue after death. Now, a UCLA-led research team has validated a standard protocol that can be used to detect one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease in living patients. This will eventually enable the diagnosis of the disease in doctors' offices and other patient care settings.
Memory problems reversed by immunotherapy
A new study from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has revealed that a single dose of an immunotherapy reverses memory problems in an animal model of Alzheimer's disease. Immunotherapy removes tau oligomers associated with Alzheimer’s disease from the brain, and may also decrease the harmful effects of amyloid beta and mitigate memory deficits. An added benefit: immunotherapy targets only the toxic oligomer form of tau and leaves the normal tau alone and able to carry out its typical functions in the brain.