Families and Caregivers

Study to find possible Alzheimer’s breakthrough

Nightly News

A new study is underway involving drugs that may prevent Alzheimer’s. NBC’s Robert Bazell reports.

F.D.A. Plans Looser Rules on Approving Alzheimer’s Drugs

By GINA KOLATA

Published: March 13, 2013

The Food and Drug Administration plans to loosen the rules for approving new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Drugs in clinical trial would qualify for approval if people at very early stages of the disease subtly improved their performance on memory or reasoning tests, even before they developed any obvious impairments. Companies would not have to show that the drugs improved daily, real-world functioning.

For more than a decade, the only way to get Alzheimer’s drugs to market was with studies showing that they improved the ability of patients not only to think and remember, but also to function day to day at activities like feeding, dressing or bathing themselves.

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Nutritional Supplement May Help Prevent Alzheimer’s, U.Va. Research Suggests

JANUARY 9, 2013
JOSH BARNEY

A nutritional supplement available over-the-counter may offer protection from Alzheimer’s disease, a study by the University of Virginia and Northwestern University suggests.

Researchers at Northwestern and U.Va.’s School of Medicine set out to evaluate the effectiveness of chiro-inositol, a compound that occurs naturally in certain foods and is available as a nutritional supplement, in protecting the brain from beta amyloid toxins, which cause Alzheimer’s. They conclude, in a paper published this month in The FASEB Journal (link available on Grounds only), that chiro-inositol “greatly enhances” insulin’s ability to prevent damage to neurons by toxic peptides called ADDLs. The damage and loss of neurons is believed responsible for Alzheimer’s.

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The 'pacemaker' implanted in the brain to prevent Alzheimer's patients losing their memory

A ‘pacemaker’ has been implanted in to the brain of an Alzheimer's patient in a bid to reduce memory loss. The device, which uses deep brain stimulation, has already been used in thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease as possible means of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline.Now the first patient in the US has undergone the delicate surgery to try and halt the effects of dementia, which slowly robs its mostly elderly victims of a lifetime of memories and the ability to perform the simplest of daily tasks.

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Upcoming Alzheimer's studies may change how disease is treated

For Alzheimer's patients and their families, desperate for an effective treatment for the epidemic disease, there's hope from new studies starting up and insights from recent ones that didn't quite pan out.

If the new studies succeed, a medicine that slows or even stops progression of the brain-destroying disease might be ready in three to five years, said Dr. William H. Thies, chief medical officer of the Alzheimer's Association. The group assists patients and caregivers, lobbies for more research and helps fund studies.