Category Archives: Research

Hope For Early Alzheimer’s Test In Spinal Fluid

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New research led by Nottingham University in the UK suggests abnormal levels of seven proteins in spinal fluid could be markers for the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, raising hopes of a test for a disease that is difficult to diagnose at the beginning. The researchers write about their findings in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

Study co-author Dr Kevin Morgan, professor of Human Genomics and Molecular Genetics at Nottingham, told the press on Tuesday that the findings are “a new lead for improving early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease”.

An early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease would help people prepare for the future and also enable them to be involved in clinical trials at a much earlier stage of the disease, when treatments are more likely to show positive results, he added.

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Alzheimer’s Families Clamor for Drug

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In the wake of research suggesting a skin-cancer drug may have benefits in treating Alzheimer’s disease, physicians and advocacy groups are getting a flurry of calls from patients seeking to use the drug off-label.

The clamor underscores how urgently patients want solutions to the rising tide of Alzheimer’s. But experts caution that more research is needed to determine whether the drug, bexarotene, is effective in humans at all, not to mention what the dosage should be.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, was conducted in mice, and the road to an effective Alzheimer’s treatment is littered with failures that looked promising early on in animals.

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New Attack on Alzheimer’s

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A cancer drug quickly and dramatically improved brain function and social ability and restored the sense of smell in mice bred with a form of Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting a new way to tackle the illness in people.

Alzheimer’s is associated with the accumulation of protein fragments called amyloid-beta in the brain. The new research found that an existing skin-cancer drug called bexarotene cleared the protein in the brains of stricken mice within days. The study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

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Tiny electrical shocks to the brain appear to enhance memory

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Lightly shocking a person’s brain just before they learned a new task appeared to strengthen memory in a handful of patients with epilepsy, a tantalizing result that could have implications for Alzheimer’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Pacemaker devices known as deep brain stimulators made by Medtronic and St. Jude Medical are already used to calm muscle tremors in patients with Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders, and are being tested for a host of other conditions such as treatment-resistant depression.

The devices are implanted under the skin in the chest with wires leading up the neck connected to tiny electrodes implanted deep in the brain, which produce electrical impulses.

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3 Million More Americans Should Get Diagnosis, Study Concludes

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Three million Americans living with mild cognitive impairment should be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, a tweak in terminology that could shed light on the condition’s cause and prepare patients for an inevitable decline, according to a new report.

The criteria for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease were revised last year, placing more people in a category called mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, which is often a precursor to Alzheimer’s.

The new criteria detail three stages of Alzheimer’s disease: preclinical (before outward symptoms are visible); mild cognitive impairment (mild memory and thinking changes enough to be noticed but not debilitating); and dementia, or full-on Alzheimer’s disease.

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How Alzheimer’s spread in brain

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Two different research groups, which worked independent of each other, have made the same important discovery on how Alzheimer’s disease spreads in the brain.

According to a story in the New York Times in February 2, the groups’ findings have the potential to give us a much more sophisticated understanding of what goes wrong in Alzheimer’s disease and, more importantly, what can be done to prevent or repair damage in the brain.

The Times reported on the research teams of Bradley T. Hyman, MD, Ph.D., at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and Karen E. Duff, Ph.D., of Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Each research group found that the Alzheimer’s disease protein called tau can apparently spread from one part of the brain to other connected areas by effectively “jumping” from one nerve cell, neuron, to another.

Read all about it HERE