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Breakthrough Ultrasound Treatment To Reverse Dementia Moves To Human Trials
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: An extraordinarily promising new technique using ultrasound to clear the toxic protein clumps thought to cause dementia and Alzheimer's disease is moving to the first phase of human trials next year. The innovative treatment has proven successful across several animal tests and presents an exciting, drug-free way to potentially battle dementia. The ultrasound treatment was first developed back in 2015 at the University of Queensland. The initial research was working to find a way to use ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier with the goal of helping dementia-battling antibodies better reach their target in the brain. However, early experiments with mice surprisingly revealed the targeted ultrasound waves worked to clear toxic amyloid protein plaques from the brain without any additional therapeutic drugs. The new announcement regarding the upcoming move to human trials is underpinned by a large funding injection from the Australian government helping accelerate the treatment's development. The first stage is a phase 1 safety trial, kicking off later in 2019, to explore the safety profile of the treatment in human subjects suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
Because you won't ever suffer from dementia or Alzheimers.
I wonder if such ultrasound machines placed inside Congress might help some of the demented souls in there. Quite a few Parliaments 'round the world might give it a shot, too.
Demented, dementia, whatever.
White Baby boomers produced an average positive net of $1,205,000 tax revenue over the course of their lives. The average black person generates a net loss of $702k.
I'm not going to assume that is true, but if it is true, the better question is what do we do about it? Are there environmental factors we can address? Is there a lead problem? Pollution? Are the schools a problem? Do we need to basically make a bunch of schools boarding schools so the environment is better controlled? Are people being trained for the jobs that exist?
Either way, i'd much rather we spent money on this kind of thing that a stupid wall. Cleaning up lead pipes would also be way more important than this wall bullshit. Do it efficiently based on need. Reduce needless lead poisoning and people should be more productive.
Yup. Remember that next time you take a pill for a fever or headache
Too bad my mom is 82 and treatment is about ten years away.
The article seems to be behind a paywall. There's an editorial on the article describing the main points at: http://atm.amegroups.com/artic...
From that editorial: "Shimamura et al. demonstrated that a microbubble-enhanced ultrasound method successfully delivered therapeutic genes into the CNS with no evidence of brain damage". So it is not only ultrasounds that are required for this procedure to work, but some microbubble injection needed. I could not find any reference on the gas used for this microbubbles, nor their size nor how they generate them. Still sounds like a very promising treatment.
I hate signatures
Clinical medication/drug trials have repeatedly shown that removing amyloid clusters doesn't reverse dementia and usually doesn't even slow its progression. I won't get my hopes up, but it'd be wonderful if things go better this time. The target seems strange, but it sounds like there might be a little more to this approach.
Very useful summary with added detail and good article link. Thanks!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ultrasound can go 3-4 cm before the signal isn't coherent enough to reflect. This might be fine in mice, but they will have to stick the transducers into brains to work in people.
It is common practice to treat the symptoms of an infection/toxin/etc rather than cure it - when you know, a cure doesn't exist. Think of viruses, antibiotic resistant bacteria, etc.
It's standard GNAA troll material.... why are you paying attention to it.
Let's put aside the effects of the disease first, and it's impact on the patients body. I want to talk about just how fucked this thing is for the rest of slashdotters, and what the worst part about the disease is. It's greed.
Let me rewind to 2 years ago. It was Christmas at my Grandma's. Grandma's really special to me, as a kid she fostered me when my druggy parents could not. She made me the man I am today, took me off the streets. Taught me things that would last a lifetime, like saying, "Please, Thank you sir, and no ma'am".
She had also amassed quite a fortune, to the tune of what I'd later learn was $20 million dollars or so. Her sons never worked. They grew up thinking they were royalty of our town. Back to Christmas though.
My father whispered to me, "This is the last Christmas we'll be having here, your uncle is going to put her in a home!" I thought he was joking. 20 years earlier, my uncle had talked her letting him be a trustee of a new trust. The trust gave him powers that in the event she lost mental faculty, he could "Do what is necessary for her care" A pretty broad statement.
He had been shopping her to various doctors around town looking for one that would give her a diminished capacity declaration. Most of them refused, but the last few he met were more than happy to do it, and recommend she be placed in a secured memory facility. Basically a prison for folks with Alzheimer's. Some of these doctors did this without ever having met my grandmother.
A letter was sent out to the family, that he was going to do this to her from the lawyer that drew up the trust.
Thankfully the court was on her side. She wanted to stay home, and had always been told by my grandfather that's where she'll stay. It took 2 years of fighting, since he had access to her money. Ironic he used her own money against her to hire lawyer after lawyer. There was a compromise made, but it was in her favor for the most part. Uncle would not have conservator over her medical or financials. He would still be a trustee of the trusts, but under a yearly audit from the courts. He would pay all of her bills (including caretakers) and for repairs to her house.
It was during that fight though that pained me the most. Him and his brothers would go over there and lie to her, tell her things to confuse her. While I was at work, they'd go over there and tell her I was the bad guy. Her story changed when she talked to the court investigator, but the investigator knew what was going on, as well as my team.
Watching family lie and manipulate the affected is the most fucked part in Alzheimer's. It reduces what's called a persons susceptibility to undue influence. I'm not going to diminish the fact that my grandma's mental state deteriorated, but the stress of court, doctors, her sons trying to manipulate her (and scaring her at one point to draw a pistol on my uncle) accelerated her condition and left her in a state I can only describe as post traumatic.
I hope this cure works. I pray it works. Been hopeful before.
>the better question is what do we do about it?
Motivate black kids to have career paths beyond "athlete" and "rapper".
If you're black and motivated to try in tech you are set for life. Schools will throw free rides at you, companies will fight to hire you. The key is getting them interested at a young age.
It's all been downhill since Cro decided to stick out his Magnon. Things were good before then, back when we ate a real paleo diet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My grandfather is a WWII vet. He could have benefited from this. It's your own fault you can't get a job.
Turned out she'd been letting my aunt railroad her for 40+ years. She ended up dumping all the estate things she hadn't had the balls to do herself on my mom as well, who ended up letting my Aunt get away with almost everything. The only major thing she got was a particular piece of furniture that family had brought out to her from her hometown that my aunt lost a coin toss over. Long story short she'd done her taxes for years BEFORE her faculties had gone and had cooked the books to look like she'd paid loans on multiple properties, while also pressuring my grandmother into selling assets which she later got the money for.
The things some family will do really make you doubt that the familial bonds are worth anything, except for those ones who prove themselves as friends for life, which doesn't take the bond of family to begin with.
I've heard the plaques are a defensive mechanism by the brain. Sort of, the brain coating itself in a protective layer when being damaged by environmental toxins or too much sugar exposure. In that case removing the plaques will hurt rather than help.
Guess we'll see...
If you read the literature (or just Google) you'll see that others have also managed to eliminate the plaques in various ways. However it remains unclear whether removal of the plaques leads to cognitive improvements. In some cases the animal models show improvement and in other cases not. The situation is even more unclear in people. There's a quick overview here. My own hunch is that a combination of early detection and then a treatment of some sort will be the way forward. Probably cognitive impairement will be hard to fix.
soylentnews.org
If you'd even read the article you linked, you would see that the amyloid plaque "cages" are left behind after the infectious agent has been killed, so yes, treating the plaques would actually make great sense - the human body fights off the infection and a non-invasive simple treatment removes the detritus. Of course, the testing will have to reveal how the brain reacts to this, but it could be a great way of staving off dementia.
Yeah, that's what we want, a Donny without addled brains.
I find it odd that this hasn't been mentioned in the comments already.
Turmeric has the very useful effect of dissolving brain plaque.
No need for expensive treatment.
Privacy begins with
Letting people have authority over their own body ... when it doesn't just involve cutting off your dick. Trump really is evil personified.
Cut your dick of if you wish, just not on my dime. If you need drugs for the rest of your life to remain in your "prefered gender", then you fucking pay for them.
Nobody was talking about dicks, but that was the first place you went. Nobody was talking about trump being evil for signing a stupid bill, but that was the second place you went. You've got some weird psychosexual group narcissistic personality disorder with delusions of paranoia going on. Sounds like you need a pretty heavy dose of ultrasound too. When you go to bed tonight, make sure to put your tinfoil hat on, it will amplify the ultrasound that the sjw team will be beaming in through the wall.
I wonder how this relates to the Radionics work of Royal Rife.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Those noises in my head are just trying to knock the plaque loose!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How is this possible, I was assured that medical advancement were only possible if we put corporations in control of medicine.
Wait ... does this work in general? Could you clear arteries with ultrasound instead of say quadruple bypass surgery?
The longer they're able to keep screwing up EVERYTHING, the worse off earth will be.
Flamebait trolling aside, if you help seniors with dementia you're actually saving the system money.
Also, will you have the same opinion in 50 years when *you're* starting to forget who the people around you are?
This looks like the most promising treatment yet, and he missed this by just a few scant years, after donated heavily to Alzheimer's research before dying (or rather, deciding to die before becoming a mental vegetable).
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Alzheimer's is likely the result of the brain trapping infectious agents: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0.... It makes little sense to treat the symptom of an infection rather than its cause.
I wouldn't call it likely. It's a recent observation. No path of causation has been shown.
It looks like the smart money is on the Alzheimers == Type 3 diabetes hypothesis. There's lots of solid causation pathways there.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Some of these patients go from being economic producers to economic consumers. Granted, the care of these people employs an army of people that may otherwise not have jobs. Let's how it plays out.
A person who has enough material goods probably has no need to steal. So, context is important. People who think they are 'good' may steal if their kid needs to eat and there's no money for food.
Agreed. However I am unaware of any state charges at present. Are you?
Such charges would also have to be leveled after he leaves office, I believe, as there is no precedent for charging a sitting President (any sitting Federal Official that I am aware of) in a state court while in office.
A society cannot consume more than it produces. Stealing from others to pay for anything, including health expenses, is immoral, inefficient, and impractical. Payment of health expenses through government programs is theft.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
That presumes a state court has jurisdiction over the office of the president of the united states ... which is very unlikely to be proven out should one actually try it.
And if that did somehow come to pass, I expect the (many) lawyers would argue the crime should be a federal matter anyway, push it into federal court, and then it becomes pardonable.
But in a practical sense (and that's to say self-preservation for politicians) no state court is going to start charging presidents (or senators etc.) in their court rooms. Why? Because then any lowly court could, in theory, take any trumped (lol) up charge and hold any politician as a criminal for the duration of the trial. Basically ... you could have a pissed off DA and judge from the other party pulling senators and house reps into jail in their states.
Never. Going. To. Happen. It's mutually assured destruction among people broadly insulated from any such worries.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.