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New Alzheimer's Treatment Fully Restores Memory Function For Mice

Posted by timothy on from the better-than-deja-vu dept.

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.

11 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. WTF AM I DOING HERE! by deadweight · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Unless society develops a sudden interest in increasing the supply of confused and sickly old people, I have to assume that this treatment would be something you do(hopefully you don't have to keep repeating it ever week thereafter forever) when you first start to detect Alzheimer's type memory issues, in order to prevent them from causing any further damage to prior memory or interfering with continued new memory formation; so that there is never any significant period of discontinuity.

      There will be the somewhat interested medical-ethics question of what to do after it(or some other treatment) is first demonstrated to work: Since there will already be a substantial population of Alzheimer's patients, who have lost varying degrees of prior memory and memory function because no (effective) treatment was available; there will be people, probably a lot of them (10s of thousands or more, in all likelihood, counting only countries wealthy enough that treating them is even on the table as a possibility) who have already irreplaceably lost much or all of their past memories; but could be treated such that they would remember subsequent events.

      I imagine that, on the plus side, such treatment would decrease the confusion, fear, and substantial helplessness that such patients face; but that coming back with capacity for new memories but little or nothing about the past has its own challenges.

    2. Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes they can. I went to visit my mom at the hospital shortly before she lost the ability of speech due to advanced alzheimers, (and admittedly also dementia), when an extant family member told her that her son (then named me) just arrived, and she said, "I don't have a son named ".." (me)". She seemed to have regressed back increasingly in time as the disease progressed.

    3. Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! by lord_mike · · Score: 2

      Yes, having had a similar experience, it really is like time travel in many ways. Alzheimers patients really travel back through time. It's not just that they remember it, in their minds they are actually living in that time in the past as their present... and that time point goes further and further back as the disease progresses. It's very discomforting to witness.

    4. Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! by rock_climbing_guy · · Score: 2

      The parent poster is right. I watched a grandmother in my family slowly fade away with Alzheimer's Disease, eventually succumbing to kidney disease. (Oftentimes, Alzheimer's doesn't kill the patient directly, but something else does.) I don't know how much her medication costed, but she required increasing human supervision as the illness progressed. When they could no longer care for her at home, they institutionalized her at great cost. I think that financial assistance is available to those who qualify, but the full price is greater than most people's salary.

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      Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
    5. Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! by Altrag · · Score: 2

      I can't think of any scenario where being cured and missing memories is in any way better than still missing those memories but having your brain slowly being eaten away and losing even more memories.

      These are already confused and sickly old people.. curing them if such a thing is possible will mean that they can eventually become less confused. Probably with a lot of therapy and rehab, similar to what we do after significant physical trauma leaves a person's body incapacitated.

      But absolutely, the people who will benefit the most from such a treatment would be those who are diagnosed early and can be treated before they lose too much.

    6. Re: WTF AM I DOING HERE! by phocion · · Score: 2

      There would be no debate at all, even for those who have experienced extreme memory loss. They might not remember their past, but the ability to retain new memories would mean they could relearn it. To give an example, when my grandmother was suffering from Alzheimer's there were days she didn't know her own daughters even though she would see them every day. Just the ability to remember from day to day who someone is would make it worth performing the treatment.

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      Smile, it makes people wonder what you're up to.
  2. Re: and then they get flowers? by BarbaraHudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the story, Charlie Gordon went back to his old job. Couldn't put up with the pity. Left. (Where he went depends on whether it's the short story or the novel).

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    "Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
  3. Re:Mouse brains are tiny. by azaris · · Score: 2

    They are smaller no doubt, but in both cases the blood brain barrier is just beneath the surface of the skull

    No it's not. It's formed by the endothelium (thin layer one cell thick that is in direct contact with the cerebral blood stream) on the smallest capillaries that penetrate deep into the brain matter.

  4. Re:Simple Request by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  5. Brain blood barrier by manu0601 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.