Slashdot Mirror
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!
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 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
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.
That might be a good thing. We do that all the time and memories lost from the last are not necessarily a bad thing. If you can restore function and record new memories, that would be a huge improvement.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Obviously you don't wait until the person has become non-functional.
You do this to prevent the future progress of Alzheimers, or even as a preventative.
You begin the treatment as soon as evidence of the plaques occurs, or even better, do it as part of regular checkups. Perhaps every 5 years would suffice because generally speaking, the progress of Alzheimer's is slow.
The best part of this is that it may be a relatively inexpensive preventative treatment. Prevention is far far more important than cure.
As for ultrasound (not) penetrating the human brain, cranial imaging using scanning ultrasound has been SOP for some time.
If you read and understood TFS you would note that they indeed make this inference. You'd have to read the paper to see the details.
You might want to look at an accompanying editorial for more details but here is some additional info:
The blood-brain barrier, a tightly packed layer of cells that lines the brain's blood vessels, protects it from infections, toxins, and other threats but makes the organ frustratingly hard to treat. A strategy that combines ultrasound with microscopic blood-borne bubbles can briefly open the barrier, in theory giving drugs or the immune system access to the brain. In the clinic and the lab, that promise is being evaluated.
This month, in one of the first clinical tests, Todd Mainprize, a neurosurgeon at the University of Toronto in Canada, hopes to use ultrasound to deliver a dose of chemotherapy to a malignant brain tumor. And in some of the most dramatic evidence of the technique's potential, a research team reports this week in Science Translational Medicine that they used it to rid mice of abnormal brain clumps similar to those in Alzheimer's disease, restoring lost memory and cognitive functions. If such findings can be translated from mice to humans, “it will revolutionize the way we treat brain disease,” says biophysicist Kullervo Hynynen of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, who originated the ultrasound method.
Some scientists stress that rodent findings can be hard to translate to humans and caution that there are safety concerns about zapping the brain with even the low-intensity ultrasound used in the new study, which is similar to that used in diagnostic scans. Opening up the blood-brain barrier just enough to get a beneficial effect without scorching tissue, triggering an excessive immune reaction, or causing hemorrhage is the “crux,” says Brian Bacskai, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who studies Alzheimer's disease and used to work with Hynynen.
My emphasis.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
NutritionFacts: studies on alzheimers
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.
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.
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
RN here. There was old lady in a nursing home who had no memory of her husband having passed away several years before. Numerous times every day, she would ask when her husband would be in to see her... One inexperienced nurse explained to her that her husband was dead; she cried hysterically. A few hours later, she asked again when her husband would be in to see her. The standard answer is, "He'll be here a little later, honey".
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.