Hopes rise for Alzheimer's cure as drugs slow onset

At the moment medications can only ease the symptoms of this incurable disease without being able to halt its progress. 

Currently the hopes are on immuno-therapies, according to Munich psychiatrist Timo Grimmer. This implies passive immunisation of the body, with anti-bodies being introduced to the patient’s system to stimulate the body’s own immune system. The aim is to reduce or at least slow down the depositing of metabolic products in the brain. This strategy could be compared with a vaccination, says Grimmer, who heads a psychiatric out-patient department at the German city’s Technical University.

“If things go well, in around two years there will be licensed anti-body therapies. Then medical science will certainly also try to develop inoculations – that is the long-term aim in any event.”

But this is all in the future. “Thus far there is no way of halting the disease,” Grimmer says. Plaque formed from proteins –amyloid-beta peptides – obstructs neural links, and brain cells die off. The result is gaps in the memory leading eventually to complete loss of memory. 

With early diagnosis, it is possible to alleviate the symptoms with medication. 

Grimmer says patients are reporting problems much earlier than in the past.

“There is increasing awareness in society resulting from the fear that the evening of one’s life could have Alzheimer’s hanging over it.

“This means that patients with more minor ailments come to us that have by no means reached the dementia stage,” he says.

“Anti-dementia drugs are able to stimulate the brain cells in these people, so that memory loss is not as noticeable at first, but at some point the disease catches up with them.

“There is considerable concern over who will provide care for dementia patients in the future, and who should pay for it. From a certain point, those affected need round-the-clock care, and the numbers affected are rising to the millions in many countries and expected to double by 2050.

“That is the decisive point that makes it so important that medical science advances. A widespread disease that affects millions of people becomes unmanageable at some point,” Grimmer says.

Luckily in most cases relatives, partners or children take the load," he says, while noting that in an increasingly individualised society, that burden is shifting on to governments.

 

 

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Hostile people more likely to suffer a stroke: study

 

Agence France-Presse

 

Feeling cynical and hostile toward others may double the risk of having a stroke in middle-aged and older adults, according to a study released last week.

The research in Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association, also found that depression and high stress increased stroke risk.

For the study, more than 6,700 adults aged 45 to 84 answered questionnaires about their state of mind and behaviour.

These surveys assessed chronic stress, depressive symptoms, anger and hostility over two years, and low scores indicated a lesser frequency of these feelings. 

Subjects reported no heart disease at the beginning of the study. 

They were followed for between eight and 11 years, during which time 147 had strokes and 48 transient ischemic attack (TIAs), a temporary blockage of blood flow to the brain.

Researchers found that those with the highest hostility scores – measured by assessing a person’s cynical expectations of other people’s motives – were more than twice as likely to have a stroke or TIA, compared to the lowest scorers.

Similarly, high scores on depressive symptoms meant an 86-per-cent higher risk, and the chronically stressed faced a 59 per cent higher risk of stroke or TIA.

Perhaps surprisingly, anger was not associated with any risk of increased stroke.

The study included a broad mix of Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic and Asian people.

The associations between psychology and stroke remained even after researchers accounted for age, race, sex, health behaviours and other known risk factors of stroke.

“There’s such a focus on traditional risk factors – cholesterol levels, blood pressure, smoking and so forth – and those are all very important, but studies like this one show that psychological characteristics are equally important,” says lead author Susan Everson-Rose, associate professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

“Given our ageing population, it’s important to consider these other factors that might play a role in disease risk.”