Alzheimer's Plaques Imaged in Living Brains

Yves writes "Japanese scientists have developed a technique to detect traces of Alzheimer's disease (amyloid plaques in the brain) on living mice... Until now, the standard way to confirm the presence of the plaques, and thus the disease, was by autopsy. The question remains: Do you really want to know early that you have Alzheimer disease, as there is no effective treatment yet?"

Comments

Personally

[KinkifyTheNation]

I've thought about this before, and I don't think I could ever live knowing that all of my memories are going to go down the drain and not even realize it. I would probably go crazy at the thought and kill myself before it happened.

Re:Personally

[finkployd]

I would probably go crazy at the thought and kill myself before it happened.

You are safe, you will not remember where you put that gun, or how to tie a noose, etc. :)

Ok, this HAS to be the most insensitive comment I have ever posted on Slashdot.

Finkployd

Re:Personally

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, this HAS to be the most insensitive comment I have ever posted on Slashdot.

What about that one about the albino chick with a sunburn?

Re:Personally

[daina]

I don't think I could ever live knowing that all of my memories are going to go down the drain and not even realize it.

But they are! It is called death. Death is really just like "quick Alzheimers".

All your memories are going to go down the drain and you won't realize it. Or are you one of the delusionals that believes otherwise?

Re:Personally

[killobillo]

Just archive all your memories on the Web. Then when you lose your memory you can go back and read it. We all forget stuff eventually.

Phosphatidylcholine

[JPyObjC Dude]

Take it and you will get better memory and many experts believe that it will prevent Alzheimer's.

Re:Phosphatidylcholine

[infonography]

Not quite clear, Phosphatidylcholine is a purified extract from lecithin http://nootropics.com/lecithin/

"The only statistically significant result was in favour of placebo for adverse events, based on one trial, which appears likely to be a spurious result. "

However, other results were;

"Alzheimer's disease sufferers have been found to have a lack of the enzyme responsible for converting choline into acetylcholine within the brain. Lecithin is a major dietary source of choline, so extra consumption may reduce the progression of dementia."

"The Cochrane Dementia and Cognitive Improvement Group's Specialized Register was searched on 15 May 2002 using the terms lecithin and phosphaditylcholine."

Want to know?

[dn15]

The question remains: Do you really want to know early that you have Alzheimer disease, as there is no effective treatment yet?

Interesting question. I doubt I'd really want to know, as much as it may sound like sticking my head in the sand. What good can it do for one's quality of life to spend their days worrying about a disease, if nothing can be done about it anyway? Maybe it would be good to be able to put your affairs in order, but besides that probably not.

Re:Want to know?

[Ayaress]

The article's got a slight innaccuracy. There are effective treatments, just no cure. However, some of the treatments are excellent, and can delay the onset of the disease and substantially slow it once it does show up. My great-grandmother was diagnosed with the disease seven years ago, but is still living a perfectly normal life for somebody her age. She worries far more about high blood pressure than Alzheimers.

Re:Want to know?

[Curtman]

It would probably be better information for the families, than for the individuals. You'd probably make better plans if you knew you were going to have to care for Grandpa as an alzheimer victim.

Re:Want to know?

[poopdeville]

She worries far more about high blood pressure than Alzheimers.

I know what you meant, but you should tighten up your semantics before some insensitive clod mentions that this isn't necessarily a good thing.

Re:Want to know?

[sakusha]

The bigger question is, do you want your insurance company to know early if you have Alzheimer's? Because they WILL know if you get tested. Forget about ever getting health insurance again if you switch jobs.

Re:Want to know?

[famebait]

Or move to a civilised country that actually manages to recognise the well-being of its citizens as a higher priority than the "right to not have health coverage".

Re:Want to know?

[Murphy Murph]

The bigger question is, do you want your insurance company to know early if you have Alzheimer's? Because they WILL know if you get tested. Forget about ever getting health insurance again if you switch jobs.

My Primary Care Physician has offered many tests to me "under the table" for that very reason.

Re:Want to know?

[orangesquid]

Hell yes I'd like to know. It'd be the perfect time to write memoirs; to recount over my life, make sure I've told the stories I want to tell, and get ready to just have fun for the rest of my life.

Even if I lose the memories inside my head, I'll have them recorded, so they won't be gone.

It's like knowing when you're going to die, except, it's knowing when a certain part of you is going to die.

Re:Want to know?

[bluenawab]

I think the importance of this breakthrough lies not in the knowledge that the patient gains, but the usefulness of this information to researchers. By diagnosing and studying the animals with alzheimers syndrome, researchers will have a clearer idea of the usefulness of various treatments.

Re:Want to know?

[russellh]

My Primary Care Physician has offered many tests to me "under the table" for that very reason.

Isn't it great when you have to sneak around the healthcare system to feel safe.

Re:Want to know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if I lose the memories inside my head, I'll have them recorded, so they won't be gone.

Maybe by then you'll be able to back them up on Google.

Re:Want to know?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would want to know. Rather than ending my life, I would take a look at some of the alternative ways of prolonging my life with my mind still intact. Perhaps cryonics? With the amazing advances in medical science that we have seen over the past couple of decades, coupled with an exponential increase in total scientific knowledge, there is a good possibility that we might be able to cure this ailment in the future.

Isn't the possibility of hope better than no hope at all?

Re:Want to know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not do those things _right now_?

Re:Want to know?

[Curtman]

Even if I lose the memories inside my head, I'll have them recorded, so they won't be gone.

I just don't think it's going to matter that much to you once you've passed on to the great recycling box in the ground. Death is inevitable, doesn't matter if its alzheimer's, or natural causes.

That would be fantastic for your family if they had some kind of record for every person in their family. That kind of thing should be done regardless of diseases.

Re:Want to know?

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure you'd like to pay for this out of your own pocket....

Thats what I thought.

Re:Want to know?

[famebait]

For him moving? no.
For public healthcare? I do, and I do so gladly. Like most of the civilised world.

Hell yeah

[Captain Splendid]

The question remains: Do you really want to know early that you have Alzheimer disease, as there is no effective treatment yet?

Why not? I'll forget it pretty soon anyway!

No effective treatment??

[DaoudaW]

Perhaps you meant to say no cure, but there are several effective treatments. My father-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer's about 5 years ago. The progress of the disease has been significantly curtailed by medication. It has also been shown that higher level thinking/learning has a significant protective effect from the symptoms of Alzheimer's. Yes, I would want to be tested specifically because there are currently effective medications and therapy which prolong quality of life.

Re:No effective treatment??

[vranash]

Sides, who knows it may get someone who'd never considered working on a cure for alzheimers to create one for the most important reason of all: to cure themselves :)

Re:No effective treatment??

[Ayaress]

Even before they had effective medications, it was better to know ahead. They determined a long time ago that people who kept an active mind tended to delay the onset of Alzheimer's symptoms. Even so much as doing the daily crossword puzzels in the newspaper and staying active is supposed to help. Beyond that, there have been therapies and even simple lifestyle changes available for a while that can be made to make dealing with symptoms easier if and when they do develop, and as a last resort, most visiting physician services have Alzheimer's specialists who can help.

Re:No effective treatment??

[FleaPlus]

There was actually an article on this a few days ago.

Original research paper in Cell: Environmental Enrichment Reduces Alpha-Beta Levels and Amyloid Deposition in Transgenic Mice
Summary in Cell: Exercise Your Amyloid

Article in Medical News Today

Quote: Mice that keep their brains and bodies busy in an "enriched" environment of chew toys, running wheels, and tunnels have lower levels of the peptides and brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease compared to mice raised in more sparse conditions, according to a new study in the 11 March issue of the journal Cell.

Levels of b-amyloid peptides, which clump together to form the brain "tangles" or plaques that are toxic to nerve cells in Alzheimer's disease, were significantly lower in the enriched mice, say Sangram Sisodia, of the University of Chicago, and colleagues. The enriched mice may have been better equipped than their less-stimulated counterparts to sweep these peptides out of the brain, according to the researchers' analysis of gene and enzyme expression in the animals.

"This goes back to the old idea of use it or lose it, that using your brain keeps it more active," Sisodia says. "It's more common sense than anything, but what we didn't previously appreciate is that it might affect the pathology that is characteristic of Alzheimer's disease." ...

The researchers also found intriguing clues that an active body, as well as an active brain, might be a key factor in reaping the benefits of an enriched environment. The most physically active of the mice in the elaborately furnished cages had the most dramatic reductions in amyloid peptides and deposits. At least among this small group of mouse workout devotees, "exercise appears to play a significant role in modulating amyloid deposition," Sisodia and colleagues write.

The researchers caution, however, that it will take more experiments with larger numbers of animals to determine exactly how enriched environments benefit mice, whether through increased physical activity, a boost in visual, social, and spatial stimuli that awaken the brain, or some combination of all of these factors.

Sisodia says exercise, along with any kind of mental activity from reading to doing the crossword puzzle, are probably the equivalent of chew toys and running wheels for humans. "It's all very important in keeping the mind active and potentially staving off effects of old age."

Re:No effective treatment??

[Anonymous Coward]

I remeber hearing that vitamin E (non synthetic kind) staves off the onset of the disease somewhat too. Vitamin E has anti-oxidant effects as well as protecting the brain. I'd guess selenium, zinc, omega 3 and vitamin C supplementation together would reduce the onset times markedly between them too. Don't give up and say "no effective treatment" when you're ill.

Re:No effective treatment??

[Kismet]

Here is another interesting treatment option. I understand that scientists will de doing some formal human-centric studies with Curcumin at the the University of Utah.

Definitly

[T-Ranger]

For the few years between when I find out and when Ive actually lost it, I can have some serious fun with people.

To prepare you have to know

[planet-sloop]

Of course I'd want to know. There is not yet a cure for AIDS,but if I had that I'd want to know so I could prolong my life through healthier living. The same goes for alzthimers, although there isn't a cure, I'm sure I could prolong the onset by way of better living. Plus it would give me a chance to pick the one outfit I want to wear for the rest of my life, the one CD I want to listen to for the rest of my life, and the book/page, I want to read for the rest of my life.

Make your Backups early and often.

[infonography]

I prefer backup to DVD. You never know when your system will crash and your may have to restore from the install disks. And yes I did read the real article, not the agenda-ridden screed.

Yes, and a joke to ensure me going to Hell

[sithkhan]

Yes, I would like to know, if nothing more than being in control of things before it becomes a problem. I could update my living will, make my wishes known to my family and loved ones, and ... what was I saying?


An older couple began to notice that they were forgetting things, so they decided to take a memory course together. They took the course and were simply thrilled with the results. One day while shopping in a local store, they met a friend. "Bill, you just have to take this memory course. It's fantastic ! It's changed our lives," the husband said. "Wow, that's great ! What's the name of the course?" The husband turned to his wife and asked, "Honey, what's the name of that flower with the long stem and thorns?" "You mean a rose?" she replied. "Yes, that's right." (PAUSE) "Rose, what's the name of that memory course we took?"

Ask your self instead

[floydman]

Do you wanna know you have Aids, if you cannot be treated?

Do you wanna know you have cancer, if you cannot be treated?

Excuse me, but the question " Do you really want to know early that you have Alzheimer disease, as there is no effective treatment yet?"" is not a very smart one.

Re:Ask your self instead

[mzieg]

Of course it's a smart question. Obviously, it's a real question. Once the test becomes readily available, doctors are going to ask plenty of people that question, as precursor to asking whether they would like to undergo the test. Unless you prefer to make up such answers on the spur of the moment, you'd do well to consider it in advance.

If your post was rhetorical, and indicated that you would never want to know those things, then fine, but others have their own right to choose, and many will choose to know. I would.

For one thing, I'd want to know because it would spur me to get off my ass and file a Living Will so I didn't drag my whole family through the Terry Schiavo case. I'd move some investments around and make some "gifts" to minimize the Death Tax and preserve as much as I could for my heirs.

I'd tell or write some things down for my sons that, perhaps, I would have otherwise "always intended" to tell them, but never quite get around to. I'd take that trip to Rome or Tokyo or wherever that I'd always kinda wanted but never done.

And then I'd row out into the middle of a lake with a bottle of scotch, my sax, and some Bach :-)

Re:Ask your self instead

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary. Questions like this are not merely a matter of fact, but a matter of opinion and different people have different opinions. Anyway, if you have a malignant cancer in your kidney, there may be no cure for the cancer itself, but you can get the kidney removed before the cancer spreads if you catch it quick enough.(Yes I know that is nothing to do with the actual question, but I thought I'd slip that in anyway.)

Pssshttt...

[Anonymous Coward]

like I'd remember after they told me.

Re:Pssshttt...

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, I'd probably keep going back to them to get a 2nd opinion, and find out what's wrong.

Even though we can already test...

[X0563511]

We can already test for this disease by reading the chromosones.

We can tell from the moment of your birth whether or not you will end up with it (provided you live long enough for it to take hold).

The thing that exites me about this is that we may be able to study how it builds up, maybe understand the disease more (the biggest step toward curing a disease is to understand it).

Re:Even though we can already test...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, genetic tests almost never determine whether you will get the disease; it only increases the conditional probability that you will get it. The idea is that you take the genetic test, and if you score positive on that, you take the imaging test every five years or so. If you score positive on that, then you start to worry.

Seeing this in the Family..

[Threatis]

I gotta say, I lost my Great-Grandmotherr to this, and it was HORRIFIC. Nothing like watching someone forget who you are, and who they are a little each day.

My father has always said, after watching his grandmother go out that way: "If that ever happens to me, just let me wander out onto a dark highway, and hope i get hit by something big".

that's not the only issue

[edward.virtually@pob]

a more disturbing aspect of this is the possibility of employers and insurers discriminating against people based on the test.

Re:that's not the only issue

[Threatis]

definately true.

thats why I've always had a little bit of a thing against these tests to find out if you carry the genome that means you'll get "this disease" or "that addiction".

Think about it: now-a-days, you get nailed in insurance if you drink/smoke/use drugs. Whats to say that in the very near future, you dont get dinged for having a higher risk of drinking/smoking/doing drugs?

Re:that's not the only issue

[StuckInSyrup]

You forget the money factor. A special MRI is needed to do this test (and this is not cheap), and I don't think that an employer (unless it's NASA and you want to go to Proxima Centauri) is going to invest that much in every single candidate.

Re:that's not the only issue

[wronskyMan]

If you read the linked New Scientist article, it says that the scientists developed a tracer for the plaques that can be detected by a regular MRI machine, so the expense of the test would be the design/production of the tracer.

not so sure

[alkaloids]

this topic is indeed huge, and something that would be very important to know. therefore i'm surprised that a finding that was actually real would be published in a garbage journal like new scientist. a google scholar search returns about 3,230 hits for articles in this area, most of which many are in peer-reviewed journals. i'm skeptical of this find unless i could see a real paper...

Re:not so sure

[Apogee]

Try this one then:
PubMed reference ... The real article seems to be published in Nature Neuroscience.

Personally, I wouldn't call New Scientist a garbage journal by the way, its aim isn't to be a strict scientific journal, but rather to bring news about science to the reasonably well educated masses. A bit like Nature was before they split off into many many subjournals.

Re:not so sure

[alkaloids]

thx. that's the one i had searched for and couldn't find. i wanted to see which isotope of fluorine they were using...

Story about reversal in mice.

[Meetch]

Australian research has turned up something "promising" using the drug Clioquinol - not without unpleasant side-effects, but chosen because it has already been used for other things (maybe scientists can come up with something friendlier). More about its initial promise on this story from Catalyst - the science show on Australia's non-commercial channel, the ABC. (Includes links to watch the story with Real or Windows Media players.)

Maybe something will come of it.

Not a case of "want to know or not"

[GoRK]

What a ridiculous question! If doctors simply never told anyone about a problem if it was currently "incurable," what kind of medical advancements could anyone ever make?

-- Being able to positively identify the plaques while a person is alive is instrumental to being able to determine the effectiveness of any proposed treatment in a timely manner. A patient could have symptoms of Alzheimers and participate in a treatment study -- if the symptoms miraculously dissapear, there would not be any way to positively determine if the treatment itself helped, or even if Alzheimers was the cause of the symptoms in the first place -- at least not until many years later when an autopsy might happen to confirm an earlier diagnosis.

Tatoos

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to start putting tattoes on your body like in Memento.

Already done....

[lunadog]

The actual novelty of this story is that the plaques are being imaged with MRI using a probe rather than SPET or PET using a probe. Both SPET and PET imaging of amaloid plaques has been possible for several years...

Yawn.

Already...

[cr0sh]

In Waco, Texas is a company who recently announced that all employees must sign a statement (or be terminated) agreeing not to smoke on company time, or during non-work personal hours, either. This agreement was to be retro-active, meaning all current smokers, if they wanted to keep their jobs, had to give up smoking. Furthermore, random (or not, it wasn't made clear) urinanlysis tests were going to be done to enforce the policy.

I can understand a policy forbidding smoking near your place of employment - but forbidding employment because you smoke? How far will this go? To the media and public they say it is for reducing their insurance rates - and on some level, I am sure it is. Call me paranoid, but I sense a greater act of imposed morality being implemented, here. Sure, there are supposedly laws on the books now against discrimination for religion and creed - but just as the USA PATRIOT Act raped our Constitution, what makes you think these laws will stand, either?

It is only a matter of time until where you are or can be employed will be based on your religion (or lack thereof), your political views, your like of operating systems, whether you eat red meat, etc.

Welcome to what the War on (some) Drugs has has ultimately brought (and will continue to bring) you...

Maybe...

[fcjunk]

What was the question again?

Re:Maybe...

[WormholeFiend]

I can't remember. Something about faulty RAM?

No early treatment?

[Praxxus]

Do you really want to know early that you have Alzheimer disease, as there is no effective treatment yet?

Sez you! I brush twice daily with a brainpaste that inhibits plaque development!

Narcotic Abuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about enjoying the rest of your life on narcotics? As you keep forgetting everything, you would forget the trips, and would therefore require minimal narcotic doses to keep you extremely happy. I guess there wouldn't be any psychical addiction so you don't need to increase dosage with time. This takes care of dying from overdose. It sounds like a very nice way to go.

Re:Narcotic Abuse?

[KinkifyTheNation]

Actually you would still crave the drug if it were addictive, you just wouldn't know why.

Fuggheddaboudit

[Doc Ruby]

Of course I want to know. I want to start saving up money, doing favors, as much as possible so people will take care of me once the damage hits. The longer I can stay alive, the better chance I'll have to be around when there's any kind of treatment. And maybe I'll have enough time to write down everything I need to remember to get through the "rough spot".

hit by something big

[jamesh]

Please don't let him do this. Many truck and train drivers who hit a person never drive again because of the impact it has on them. And it makes one hell of a mess.

There are much cleaner ways of doing the job.