This is the first serious glimmer of hope regarding Alzheimer’s.
Simply having a protocol that stops the disease or even seriously
slows it is powerful. It provides a real reason for early diagnosis.
Up to now, it merely informed the victim about how he or she was
going to die.
Now we can quickly halt the progress of the disease at least until
the body has truly aged out and is well past its prime. This is
hugely important in terms of securing and retaining an active old
age.
I think that actual damage reversal is going to prove a seriously
intractable problem not least because nature itself has not seen
reason to fix the problem already. Thus I am more than happy to stop
the decline and recommend the victim explore chess. It is a blessing
Study Suggests
Alzheimer's Disease Can Be Stabilized
In a small trial,
patients given an existing drug showed no cognitive decline over
three years.
SUSAN YOUNG
Wednesday, July 18,
2012
Alzheimer's patients
given a drug that is already used to treat immune disorders saw their
condition stabilize in a small study presented at a conference this
week.
Study participants
were given the compound—known as intravenous Ig, or IVIg—for
three years. During this period, they showed no signs of further
cognitive decline or memory loss. Although the study was small,
it provides hope that the devastating disease can be stopped or
slowed in humans.
The work was presented
on Tuesday at the Alzheimer's Association International
Conference 2012 in Vancouver by Norman Relkin, a
neurologist at the Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Alzheimer's is the sixth leading cause of death in the United
States; 35 million people are estimated to have the disease today, a
figure that is expected to balloon in the coming decades. Its
biological basis is not well understood, but researchers suspect that
plaque buildup in the brain caused by aggregates of a protein called
beta-amyloid or a protein called tau (or perhaps both) contributes to
the death of neurons seen in those with the disease.
Currently, patients
have no drug treatment options for preventing or even slowing
Alzheimer's. Some medications are available to treat the symptoms,
but their beneficial effects are only temporary. This week's
announcement provides a welcome glimmer of hope that more options may
be on the way.
"This study
suggests that you can potentially stop or slow down Alzheimer's
disease," says Kun Ping Lu, a physician scientist at
Harvard Medical School, who studies the disease. "It suggests
for the first time in a human clinical trial that this disease can be
stopped if we have a way to identify it early."
One reason Alzheimer's
is so difficult to treat is that symptoms take a long time to appear.
"Common sense in the field is that Alzheimer's takes more than a
decade to develop, and by the time your brain has damage, it's very
hard to reverse," says Lu. "If we are going to treat
Alzheimer's disease, we have to find out as early as possible which
patients are going to eventually get [it]."
State-of-the-art
diagnosis involves monitoring brain scans and biomarkers in
the spinal fluid to predict the onset of the disease years before it
takes effect, as well as observing clinical symptoms through mobility
and memory tests. And recent research suggests that the first
signs of Alzheimer's can even be detected decades before symptoms
arise (see "An Alzheimer's Warning 25 Years Before Symptoms
Show").
All participants in
the study had mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease. Only four
received the optimal dose of IVIg over three years. These
patients showed no decline from their baseline state in cognition,
memory, daily functioning, or mood—all expected effects of the
disease. Patients who initially received a placebo but were later
switched to IVIg treatment declined more slowly while receiving the
drug.
IVIg, which is sold by
the drug company Baxter and others, contains a mixture of
antibodies isolated from the pooled plasma of blood donated by
healthy people. The assumption is that this blood by-product contains
antibodies from the healthy donors that attack the damaged proteins
in Alzheimer's patients.
Should the product
prove effective in an ongoing 360-participant trial, it
could become difficult to meet demand. Two weeks of treatment with
the drug costs $3,000 to $5,000. However, Dean Hartley, director of
science initiatives at the Alzheimer's Association, says if the
treatment is shown to be successful in larger trials, then the
positive results are likely to be followed by a jump in production.
He also expects such results to inspire a large number of scientific
studies aimed at identifying the functional ingredients in the immune
mixture, so that others could potentially develop a synthetic form.
"I really do hope
that it turns out to work, because then it gives a good platform to
start finding out what components are in there," Hartley says.
"What is it in the IVIg—is it selective antibodies against
beta-amyloid, against tau, or something else?"
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