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New Alzheimer's Treatment Fully Restores Memory Function For Mice
New submitter wrp103 writes Australian researchers have come up with a non-invasive ultrasound technology [abstract] that clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques — structures that are responsible for memory loss and a decline in cognitive function in Alzheimer's patients. A slice: Publishing in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes the technique as using a particular type of ultrasound called a focused therapeutic ultrasound, which non-invasively beams sound waves into the brain tissue. By oscillating super-fast, these sound waves are able to gently open up the blood-brain barrier, which is a layer that protects the brain against bacteria, and stimulate the brain’s microglial cells to move in. Microglila cells are basically waste-removal cells, so once they get past the blood-brain barrier, they’re able to clear out the toxic beta-amyloid clumps before the blood-brain barrier is restored within a few hours.
The team reports fully restoring the memories of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue. They found that the treated mice displayed improved performance in three memory tasks - a maze, a test to get them to recognise new objects, and one to get them to remember the places they should avoid.
shortly after their human friend dies.
lose != loose
So..I'll find myself in a nursing home one day with no idea how I got there, my car will be sold, my pr0n erased, and my wife partying it up with the pool boy? I can see some surprises in store when they fire this up.
Why teh fuck did I start this? Oh yeah. I'm game. I need my brain to be ultrasounded asap.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Blasting techno music through headphones might deafen me but at least I won't get Alzheimers disease.
Just as a rough comparison, a mouse brain weighs 0.4 g, a human brain 1320 g. So right off the bat I'd be skeptical of whether this could be scaled up to treat humans. But still, it's a very interesting result.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If your idea is that amyloid-beta causes Alzheimer's like symptoms in mice and your treatment reduced amyloid-beta and improved symptoms, then show a plot of amyloid-beta levels vs behavioral outcome. There is no reason that both measurements can't be done using the same animals. If they were done with the same animals, I have no idea what the excuse for not having that as part of the publication could be.
RENEW!
I'm not sure, but it's definitely spreading like a disease does.
Another overblown cure. The amyloid plaques are associated with permanent damage (ie. actual neuron loss), so you won't cure anyone by removing all of the plaques. You'd have to regrow neurons, and only certain portions of the brain can do that - even if you did, you'd still have to relearn and get new memories.
In other words, like a damaged hard drive, fixing the heads doesn't bring back the lost data.
Further, the ultrasound can't penetrate the brain the way it can with a mouse, so the treatment won't work for humans.
Then, it also doesn't address the cause of the plaques, which is thought to be a diabetes-like process that will continue.
If this works, it will be a big money-saver by emptying a lot of "homes" where people need 24/7 care because of their mental condition and the accompanying physical problems.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
This is the best news i have gotten in a while!! I can't believe there is now a cure for ..
ummm let me read the article again
40 years? 20 years? 10?
So we'd better encourage them to move it out of the lab and into trials fast....
...Terry Pratchett's big research donation had anything to do with this...
If so, it's one more reason to be grateful for him...
You have no insight whatsoever. If a Republican can make money on it, it will be available. Now, getting Medicare to pay for it, that's a completely different issue.
I enjoy a good libtard troll as much as the next /.er, but you need to try harder. Don't just come out say "Republican's bad!". You've got to go about it indirectly. Try this next time:
This looks great, but the insurance companies have been blocking advanced treatments like this for years because they don't want to pay for it. Maybe we'll see it in Europe or the UK with the NHS, but here in the States nobody will want to pay for it.
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Finally I can picture a real use for that Brainiac Cap from Superman.
Phase Beam Arrays are used all over to direct minute synchronized impulses from different directions that sync up in "phase" at their target Zone and use Resonance to become more than the sum of their parts.. to deliver significant amounts of insignificant energy which pass harmlessly through surrounding tissues.
The Inverse using Sensors or Microphones can "Synthesize" a more accurate or sensitive instrument than can be actually deployed or physically built.
Synthetic Apeture Telescopgraphy or Radar are commonly used.. the concept is also used with Gravitational Lensing to deconform images from distant stars.
Pion stars using Muons were used to deliver radiation for cancer treatment at one time.. but since this is acoustic.. and more chemical rather than nucleonic in nature far more targeted.
NutritionFacts: studies on alzheimers
...it is the way of his kind
What was this article about again?
while there is right now a really promising result from Biogen, in clinical trials on humans:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102521170
THAT is news. Not some un-vetted academic work, interesting as it might be, which will need at least 10 more years of experimentation before human trials, if this approach does not die before (at least 98% probability, but of course I wish the researchers luck).
I think Slashdot needs more expertise in selecting science stories.
"YES!!!!! I have successfully tricked the humans into leaving a bunch of ultrasonic equipment near our cage!"
"So what are we doing tonight, Brain?"
"Same thing we do every night, Pinky - using ultrasonics to take over the world!"
Well, Biogen's drug may have its place but it isn't exactly a Speedy Gonzales, and its side-effects include brain swelling.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ma...
"Wall Street analysts predict could get the drug to market by 2020"
Also, this research is more elegant - it uses your blood's own cleanup cells to fight the plaques, versus injecting you with a foreign antibody like Biogen's does.
Do you know where, if possible, to find the data on this? I only found this press release which does not report error bars, etc (just means and p-values):
http://www.biogenidec.com/press_release_details.aspx?ID=14712&Action=1&NewsId=2486&M=NewsV2&PID=61997
It all depends who is doing the vetting.
Very funny. I guess forgetting log messages, exit statuses, and stderr is Alzheimer-like.
This is potentially an amazing breakthrough! Let's hope it does scale up safely for human trails.
The brain blood barrier is not just a fence against bacterias (evolution would have gave us blood barriers for other critical organs). It is also there to prevent neurotransmitters to leak or to break in.
For instance, eating dopamine does not increase dopamine in the brain. If you want to increase dopamine, you can either take a drug that prevent it from being cleared, or eat a precursor that can cross the barrier like Tyrosine, or closer, L-dopa, but here the brain remain capable to regulate dopamine increase.
There's starting to be some interesting science fiction about the problems of what happens when we can cure Alzheimer's.
And I suspect Sir Terry Pratchett would have volunteered to try this if they'd announced it a few months earlier.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I for one would'nt mind a bit of cleaning up there.
In the absence of detailed information, one technique would be to use a "spike" or infinite-impulse Dirac function, which contains equal magnitude of all frequencies.
Thus I've not infrequently found that popping someone upside the head was all that was needed to restore them to clear thinking. This only proves my belief.
So maybe the cure for Alzheimer's is to let the oldies play tackle football.
This is one of the first things that promise to be effective. Of course, it will still take a decade or so to be safe, but given the tremendous loss Alzheimer patients face, even significant risk would be worth it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques...". On autopsy, some alzheimers patients have been seen to have had no amyloid plaque while others who had no symptoms of alzheimers had large amounts of amyloid plaque... The brain produces it's own insulin and the high levels of fructose and related sugars in western diets result in Type 3 diabetes. Fructose is to alzheimers now as smoking was to lung cancer in the 20th century... But there's another important contributing factor, which is how the brain creates and maintains memory. Memories that no longer have importance are deleted. When you warehouse elderly people, drug them, take away all decisions and responsibilities and isolate them from their families they have nothing left to care about. Combine social isolation with fructose induced Type 3 diabetes and you have an alzheimers epidemic.
I really, really want to see that third test.