For Edge on Alzheimer’s, Testing Early

[din]

November 8, 2010
For Edge on Alzheimer’s, Testing Early Treatments

By PAM BELLUCK

Much of the research on Alzheimer’s next year will be about going back in time, trying to determine when and how the brain begins to deteriorate.
Scientists now know Alzheimer’s attacks the brain long before people exhibit memory loss or cognitive decline. But the specifics are crucial because so far, drug after drug has failed to effectively treat Alzheimer’s in people who already show symptoms. Many scientists now think the problem may be that the drugs were given too late, when, as Dr. John C. Morris, an Alzheimer’s expert at Washington University in St. Louis, puts it, “there’s a heck of a lot of brain cell damage and we’re trying to treat a very damaged brain.”
If drugs could be given sooner, tailored to specific biological changes, or biomarkers, in the brain, treatment, or even prevention, might be more successful.
“We’re trying to go earlier and earlier in the course of the disease,” said Neil Buckholtz, chief of the Dementias of Aging branch at the National Institute on Aging. “The idea is to locate how people move through these stages and what indications there are of each stage.”
Several research projects are expecting to make strides next year.
One involves the world’s largest family to experience Alzheimer’s disease, an extended clan of about 5,000 people in Colombia, many of whom have inherited a genetic mutation that guarantees they will develop dementia, usually in their 40s. Except for its clear genetic cause and that it strikes people so young, the Colombian condition is virtually identical in its disease process to more common Alzheimer’s, which has unknown causes and afflicts millions of elderly people.
A team of American and Colombian scientists plans to test treatments on Colombians in their late 30s and early 40s who are destined to get Alzheimer’s but have not yet developed symptoms to see if dementia can be prevented or significantly delayed. The treatment, to be chosen by an independent panel, will be a drug or vaccine that attacks beta-amyloid, the protein associated with plaques, deposits between nerve cells. A project leader, Dr. Eric Reiman, director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix, said testing on as many as 2,000 people, including about 750 with the mutation, is likely to begin late next year or early in 2012.
Meanwhile, the project, begun this year, has had some tantalizing findings. To try to find the youngest age at which brain changes appear, brain scans, spinal taps and memory tests were conducted with 44 family members, ages 18 to 26.
While Dr. Reiman said he could not discuss specific data yet, the tests showed enough evidence of Alzheimer’s-related biomarkers on people with the mutation that fMRI brain scans will be done on even younger family members, ages 8 to 17. If the scans reveal children with the mutation have Alzheimer’s-like anomalies, like atrophy in the hippocampus, which is involved in forming new memories, that would suggest the brain begins transforming decades before symptoms appear.
To examine when beta-amyloid begins accumulating, the project will also conduct amyloid imaging on an additional 50 family members, age 18 and older.
The team, also led by Dr. Pierre Tariot of the Banner institute and Dr. Francisco Lopera, who is at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, also plans to test drug treatments on an unrelated group: 60- to 80-year-old Americans with a different rare trait: two copies of the ApoE4 gene, which does not cause but increases risk of common Alzheimer’s.
A different project, the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network, or DIAN, led by Dr. Morris, is studying members of families in the United States, Australia and Britain who have mutations that cause dementia at age 46, on average. DIAN has recruited 100 people, 18 and older, whose parents had Alzheimer’s-causing mutations but who do not yet show symptoms; it plans to recruit 300 more. So far, researchers have found evidence that “biomarker changes do seem to occur at least 10 years, maybe 20 years before the age of onset” of symptoms, Dr. Morris said.
DIAN also plans to test drugs on participants, hopefully within three years, and is talking with companies, which are interested, but need assurance that testing drugs on apparently healthy people, those without symptoms, is worth the investment and potential risk, Dr. Morris said.
The Colombia and DIAN projects are “really the first time companies have come to grips with this,” said Dr. Morris, who believes Alzheimer’s is so complex that a combination of drugs will be needed to attack different biomarkers.
Another project looking for early signs is the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, or ADNI, a collaboration of government and industry, involving scientists at 55 research sites in the United States and Canada. It has been following about 800 people for about six years and has yielded significant findings about changes in the hippocampus, and about screening for Alzheimer’s proteins with PET scans and spinal fluid tests.
ADNI will recruit 550 more participants, including many with budding memory loss called early mild cognitive impairment.
They will be, Dr. Buckholtz said, “not quite as sharp as they were previously, but not to the point where they are really forgetting.”

[Catya Sher]

This will not be welcome to hear.
However, I observe in people with vagueness of speech and thought, for example, they speak and write INDISTINCTLY, making you, the recipient, ask all sorts of questions to clarify - that there is more spiritual affliction than any other factor.

This vagueness is perhaps a sign of one or another of these related memory loss or other similar brain ailments.

Notice when people cannot articulate what they mean or give vague statements. Some types of people just love soaking in all the extra attention and will do anything to get it.
So, when advanced Alzheimer's sets in, they are of course requiring round the clock care.
WHICH IS exactly what their subconscious mind has drawn to them, in accordance with their REAL - not stated - wishes.

What I remark is that people who DON'T seek all this excessive attention from others, or demand to be waited on, will live lives of mental clarity to the very end.

THIS should be something to pay close attention to in one's prayers, for it's a special gift - these days. In earlier days, this disease was not nearly so common.

Why so prevalent these days? I believe it's because people surrender in various ways to the mainstream "thought", to TV, marketing, and many aggressive modes which make inroads into one's own belief system. Negative inroads.

The way to prevent these conditions is to stay firmly outside the range of any people, places, situations, which harbor bad energies, as in demons.

Scientists will laugh, but wait til the facts are finally unveiled way later, that it's the encroachment of devils on the minds and souls of humans which is responsible for 90 % of cases of dementia. As well as other mental disorders, too.

One has to ignore "the crowd" which has the voice of demons. Instead to follow where God leads without fighting it.
The fighting against God's wishes is likely what opens the door originally to all this mental fog.

[Catya Sher]

Yes!
This all actually fits together.

The people who are prone to various mental conditions, not JUST Alzheimer's, are those who I would briefly sum up are "leeches".

They do this attention-seeking to make other people have to cater to them in some way. It's a demonic pattern to start with.

Let me give you an example. A friend's landlady was this type. Of Swedish extraction, this elderly woman would go to doctors' offices as her source of entertainment. In short, when she felt she was not getting enough attn. from people, she would schedule a visit to a doctor. There would be no need; the physician would say, "Come back in a year".
But she would be back in a month or two.
Why did she like this?
Because the nurses had to fuss over her, giving much energy/attention to her starved self.
The physician would then have to listen to long tales of pretended or exaggerated woes, filling up this void in her.

She would return in the best mood, having wiped out the entire office with her theatrics.
Somehow this type GAINS energy by taking it from others, often by force.
So God pays them back for their predatoriness.

She had no belief in God, had lived a life with drinking and not particularly good morals. So like Unknown says, she had no faith in God.
When that happens, a person becomes the vehicle for demons to harass, harm or even enslave others.
Does this sound familiar re the American wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ?

Back to this notorious type, she spent so much complaining about imagined "emergencies" that her relatives finally fitted her out with some sort of buzzer which, if she her caregivers were not there, would buzz a special medic team to arrive directly at the house.

So she buzzed it two times for a lark, and made the team come for nothing at all - thousands of dollars, each time, of course.
Finally they said if she did this again, the buzzer would be taken away.

One time she felt that she was not soaking up enough of other people's time and attention and of course pressed it.
She pretended to be in a coma.
But gave herself away by sitting up to say some bad things about my friend !

This is the type of person who is more prone to getting Alzheimers.
With the "Me Society" we have in America, there are many, many of all ages like this Swedish woman.

So though aluminum pans are usually blamed, because Americans desperately seek some sort of mechanical explanation for whatever is wrong.
Instead of looking at one's own sins or misdeeds or words used wrongly, perhaps to manipulate others, they are almost frantic to attribute all these terrible illnesses to EXTERIOR factors.

Never do they take responsibility themselves! Let's say, it's rare.

I wrote this hurriedly since I can hear my Swiss Chard straight from the fields burning. In my French CAST IRON pan, naturally-!!

[PFgulalai]

Come on, Catya...You are giving too much credit to your little friend demon Pazuzu for being the etiologic agent for Alzhiemer's disease (AD). Nobody is expected to know "everything" about AD, but at least one shouldn't commit grave "sin" by misguiding innocent individuals who don't even bother to know "something" by searching the wealth of information themselves.By the way, is there some fun being in a chronic state of DELUSION? More importantly, what you have described is not AD; it is another psychological disorder called "Histrionic Personality Disorder" in which the patient tries to seek attention by being overly dramatic and emotional.I won't suggest you to read about AD since your intellectual capacity is good for studying Obscurantism and Pesudo-Psychology ONLY.

The increase in AD cases over the years is due to the fact that modern science, especially neurobiology, advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few decades together with highthroughput techniques which helped in improving the diagnosis of AD. Also, the disease is more prevalent in western world not because of their immoral behavior, but due to the fact that the developing and underdeveloping countries do not have access to such advanced diagnosis facilities.There is also a Statistical Abnormality-(defined as "a certain behavior/characteristic relevant to a low percentage of the population. However, this does not necessarily mean that such individuals are suffering from mental illness)-in your argument; we don't have a worldwide epidemiological survey of AD patients, so the mere speculation of AD being a predominantly western disease due to their devilish lifestyle is utterly flawed. Mind you, even in our part of the world (Pashtunkhwa) you will find old people suffering from progressive dementia.Dementia is not a new concept-the ancient Greek Philosophers and physicians have shown the association between old age and dementia before Alois Alzhiemer, the German Physician, described the first clinical case in 1901.

Scientists will laugh, but wait til the facts are finally unveiled way later, that it's the encroachment of devils on the minds and souls of humans which is responsible for 90 % of cases of dementia. As well as other mental disorders, too.

LOLWOOT!!! But interesting.Where do you get your facts from? Have you met any devil? Have you seen how devil enters into the mind/brain of AD/dementic patient? Which route of entry does it take? Is it the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, rectum, or open wound? When did you conduct the survey to conclude to come up with 90% figure? Too much intellectual dishonesty.Let me simplify it for you-The disease is called AD which is a kind of dementia; it affects certain individuals; there is progressive degeneration of neuronal mass and abnomal neural strcutures in brain (Plaques and Tangles) are considered the prime suspects; and the patients loss cognitive and social abilities to deal with such ordinary situations as knowing how to drink water!

Those who still have intact BRAINS (if any??) should spend time in educating people rather than misguiding them all the time.