Scientists Find New Target For Alzhiemer's

GarryFre writes "Neurological researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found a new therapeutic target that can potentially lead to a new way to prevent the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The target called neutral sphingomyelinase (N-SMase) is a protein which, when activated, can cause a chain of reactions in the cell leading to neuronal death and memory loss. Already a substance has been found that shows some promise in halting the progression of the disease."

Comments

Hope for Pratchett?

[Sparkycat]

It seems like Alzheimer's research is progressing surprisingly rapidly. I wonder if treatments will come soon enough to save the minds of people already in the early stages? Terry Pratchett in particular springs to mind.

Re:Scary, scary illness

[smellsofbikes]

In addition to trying to deal with someone who doesn't remember you, there can be major inter-family problem because at least some Alzheimers patients can no longer tell what happened from what they think happened, so you run into situations where the person says "why doesn't my son ever come visit me?" when the son in question is sitting in the room, and other family members, not realizing that the person is flat-out wrong, start resenting one another based on the testimony of, well, a crazy person.

And then the patient starts saying the nursing staff is abusive, and that the doctor hurts her when he checks her out -- and who do you believe? because while you know your grandmother is now basically totally unreliable, you also know that the staff knows that too and if they *were* abusive, who would know? and so you run into situations where some family members are trying to keep the patient happy and others are saying the patient needs to be moved to another facility, and others are so upset about the whole situation that they've stopped even visiting...

When my grandmother finally died, the sense of relief was palpable, and several years later, most all her relatives are friendly to one another again, and that was with a good nursing home, everyone living locally and visiting every week, and all of us talking regularly about the problems with each other to try to keep exactly this from happening.