Stories tagged Alzheimer's disease
An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but a cup of coffee may help, too. Researchers have found that caffeine blocks the damage that cholesterol does to the body, and may lower the risk of Alzheimer's and dementia.
Tags : A direct route
Researcher William Frey II (Regions Hospital and the University of Minnesota) has stirred up conversation recently about a possible new method of administering drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. For the past 20 years, Frey has been researching and developing a nasal spray to deliver drugs directly to the brain. Other methods of delivery (such as intravenous and oral) do not allow certain drugs to cross the brain's protective blood-brain barrier.
The nasal spray method, reviewed in Drug Delivery Technology, bypasses the blood-brain barrier by delivering the drug to the nerve endings in the upper portion of the nose. These nerves lead directly to the central nervous system.
A promising development
Frey plans to test the method for the delivery of deferoximine, a drug that removes toxic amounts of iron from the body. Some scientists believe that a high level of certain metals in the brain can cause damage to brain cells , which may be part of what leads to Alzheimer's disease. If the drug's safety is proven in animal studies, Frey hopes to test the nose-to-brain delivery of deferoximine in humans.
Researchers do not yet know if this type of drug delivery could treat symptoms of Alzheimer's or if it may lead to a cure for the disease. Clinical trials in humans may be more than a year away, but Frey's discovery, along with other advances in research, offers hope for keeping patients healthy in the future.
Sources:
Drug Delivery Technology. "Nose-to-brain delivery." 5(4):64-72, 2005.
TwinCities.com. "Nose to brain is a promising path in Alzheimer's fight." 2 Feb 2008.
Posted by Meredith Craven, a communications assistant in the Academic Health Center Office of Clinical Research at the University of Minnesota
A slice of a brain infected with Alzheimer's: The disease shrinks brain tissue and leads to severe memory loss. Photo by AJC1 at Flickr.com
Researchers at Stanford have developed a blood test which, in early trials, has been 90% accurate in identifying patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The test is also 80% accurate in predicting who will get Alzheimer’s in the next 2 to 6 years.
The article notes:
At present, treatments for Alzheimer's disease are not very effective, so some people might not want early notification that they have an incurable ailment. But other people might want it.
What do you think? If you had an incurable disease that would not start to manifest itself for several years, would you want to know?
Alzheimer's sniffer?: Are declining abilities to sense certain smells a sign that Alzheimer's disease is coming? Some researchers think it might be a possibility.While lost memories are the most evident sign of full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, new research is showing that our nose may be able to detect the onset of the dreaded condition.
A new study is targeting our sense of smell as being one of the first things to be impacted by Alzheimer’s. An easy scratch-and-sniff test might be the key to discovering the start of the condition in a person.
Through a five-year study, 150 people with memory loss had their noses’ effectiveness tested and compared with similar results in 63 healthy adults. The test was to have all of them identify ten specific smells – lemon, strawberry, smoke, soap, menthol, clove, pineapple, natural gas, lilac and leather.
What the researchers found was that the same percentage of people who had difficulty identifying the smells matched closely to the same percentage of people who develop Alzheimer’s through research that’s conducted by using MRI scans to measure brain volume loss.
While there’s not a direct correlation between the smell test and brain testing, researchers think it could be a good tool for doctors to use in monitoring the possible start of Alzheimer’s. Patients who do poorly on the smell test could go through more extensive testing that might find some early signs of the disease.
And while there is no cure, there are drugs and treatments that can slow down the progress of Alzheimer’s in the body. The sooner signs of the condition are discovered, the quicker slow-down action can be taken.
How does this all smell to you? Share your thoughts here with other Science Buzz readers.
Have you ever wondered why medicine seems to be so ineffective in dealing with many neurological diseases? We have treatments and drugs to combat disorders throughout the rest of the body, but diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s remain difficult to treat.
A team of scientists recently created a drug that can cross the blood-brain barrier to treat neurological diseases in mice. Capillary walls in the brain are very effective at controlling which molecules can pass into the spaces between neurons. This protects the brain from potentially harmful chemicals in the blood. Until now, this also prevented much needed medicines from penetrating into an affected brain!
But, wait. If the brain is so great at preventing molecules from penetrating capillary walls, how do diseases get through? Some viruses, such as rabies, are able to trick the barrier into letting them through. Researches attached one of these trickster molecules from rabies onto a drug, and found that the drug was delivered through the capillary wall and into the brain.
In this study, scientists infected mice with Japanese encephalitis. Medicine delivered using the new method kept 80 percent of diseased mice alive for 30 days, while all of the untreated mice died.
While researchers tested this technique only on mice, soon this could provide huge benefits to humans. The drug used to combat encephalitis in mice uses a kind of RNA, short-interfering RNAs (siRNAs), that block the activity of a gene. This type of RNA can be custom tailored to target almost any disease-causing gene or protein. Combined with the molecules that can break through the blood-brain barrier, scientists could more effectively treat Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and many more neurological diseases.
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