Experimental Drugs Offer Hope in Prevention of Alzheimer’s Onset

According to the Alzheimers Association, an estimated 5.4 million Americans are living with Alzheimers disease. And the number of people with the disease will increase each year as the proportion of the U.S. population over age 65 continues to growand its predicated it will escalate rapidly as the baby boom generation ages.

Now for some potentially good news.

Scientists have selected three different types of Alzheimers drugs to be tested in the first large-scale international attempt to prevent the disease in people who are otherwise doomed to get it, reports The New York Times.

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The Times explains that, Most of the test subjects will have no symptoms . . . but they would be expected to start showing signs of problems with memory and thinking within five years unless the drugs work. The hope is that by intervening early, the disease might be headed off. Another study starting next year involves an extended family in Colombia that shares the same mutation. Anyone who inherits that mutated gene gets Alzheimers disease. A third study will involve people in the United States age 70 and older who seem perfectly healthy and who do not have any known Alzheimers mutations but in whom, brain scans show, the disease is starting to manifest itself.

Dr. Randall Bateman, the studys principal investigator, is also been part of a group of scientists that Washington University in St. Louis says has assembled the most detailed chronology to date of the human brains long, slow slide into full-blown Alzheimers disease . . . As part of an international research partnership known as the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimers Network (DIAN), scientists at Washington University and elsewhere evaluated a variety of pre-symptomatic markers of Alzheimers disease in 128 subjects from families genetically predisposed to develop the disorder.

Using medical histories of the subjects parents to estimate the age of the onset of symptoms for the study participants, the scientists assembled a timeline of changes in the brain leading to the memory loss and cognitive decline that characterizes Alzheimers. The earliest of these changes, a drop in spinal fluid levels of the key ingredient of Alzheimers brain plaques, can be detected 25 years before the anticipated age of onset.

Thats a dramatic finding that highlights why the results of these new drug trials could be so significant.

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Experimental Drugs Offer Hope in Prevention of Alzheimer’s Onset