Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"Red meat time and time again comes out as increasing risks for a wide array of ailments, in normal weight people as well."
Correlation does not equal causation. The most recent study combining the available data from studies across the globe across two hundred years actually found high vegetable fat content rather than animal fats as the biggest contributor to heart problems.
Red meat is higher in cholesterol, heavy exercise (heavy weight, not high intensity) triggers hormonal reactions that cause your body to actually utilize cholesterol in natural hormone production. That natural hormone production also increases lean mass. Not only does your cardiovascular fitness increase but you expend more calories in every activity you perform, for that matter you burn more calories even when resting.
Additionally, heavy lifting puts short bursts of high pressure on your blood vessels, this strengthens and widens them both keeping their walls flexible, elastic, and smooth which prevents the plaque build-up that leads to vascular problems like heart attacks and expands your blood and therefore total blood oxygen content which helps prevent things like congestive heart failure. It isn't magic, the body is just responding to the stresses you put on it and you are physically pushing (gently because hydraulics distribute the pressure across the entire vascular system) on the blood vessels in bursts and at the same time putting a requirement for heavy amounts of oxygen across major muscle groups.
I do draw a big distinction through between multiple group full body exercise with free weights and body building however. Heavy full body exercises with free weights are difficult to perform correctly and require learning proper technique. An improper movement loaded with a heavy weight can obviously injure you quickly. Body building and isolation techniques result in large muscle mass that is cosmetic and not in proportion to the way the body has evolved, accessory muscles are weakened, and frankly the culture that surrounds it pushes unsafe diet and chemicals. Lifting for strength without those things will result in a lean and fit body but not a hulk.
All things in moderation however, there was a famous power lifter who ate nothing but McDonalds and did have a heart attack. Heavy lifting counteracts some of the risks of high overall cholesterol, that doesn't mean your cholesterol shouldn't have an appropriate ratio of ldl and hdl. Also, I'm not saying it isn't easier to avoid red meat, that is probably the answer to most since it is unlikely everyone is going to begin a heavy freeweight 5x5 three times a week. But if they did, combined with moderate red meat intake and calorie intake, they'd all have superior heart health, live longer, be less obese, and have healthy natural sex drives.
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.