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Breakthrough in treatment of Alzheimer's?

Thursday 15th December 2011
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For years researchers and those in biomedical science jobs have been finding new ways to battle the growing problem of treating Alzheimer's.

Recently there have been a number of studies that have developed various methods of treating the condition from antibodies that enable doctors to understand how the disease is working in affected people to video game players that have helped the study into how it can be genetically passed on.

Alzheimer's disease is a prevalent mental illness in Britain, and a report conducted by staff at the King's College London and the London School of Economics found that 700,000 people in the UK suffered from the condition in 2007 which rose to 750,000 by 2010. The research also found that 16,000 Britons that had the disease were under the age of 60.

Doctors have used a number of methods to treat the disease and give them a better chance of gaining improved understanding of the condition. Thousands of video game players were recently asked to help in a study to allow doctors to gain further insight into the cause of Alzheimer's, diabetes and cancer over the past year. Gamers were invited to play a game called Phylo, developed by Dr Jérôme Waldispuhl of the McGill School of Computer Science and collaborator Mathieu Blanchette.

The aim was to allow casual game players to contribute to scientific research by arranging multiple sequences of coloured blocks that represent human DNA. Over the past year 17,000 players of Phylo have been able to play the game for fun or attempt to decode a particular genetic disease.

Dr Waldispuhl said: "Phylo has contributed to improving our understanding of the regulation of 521 genes involved in a variety of diseases. It also confirms that difficult computational problems can be embedded in a casual game that can easily be played by people without any scientific training."

Various research techniques such as the one's developed by Dr Waldispuhl and Mr Blanchette have enabled other researchers to create a number of methods in how to combat the disease rather than just to look into the effects of it.

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies believe they have developed a drug that significantly slows down the devastating mental effects the condition has on a sufferer. The drug known as J147 was given to mice who had Alzheimer's and was shown to improve memory and in some cases prevent brain damage that the disease causes. While it is not yet known if the drug will be safe to test on humans it has been seen as a major breakthrough for treating the condition.

David Schubert, the head of Salk's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory, whose team developed the new drug, said: "J147 enhances memory in both normal and Alzheimer's mice and also protects the brain from the loss of synaptic connections. No drugs on the market for Alzheimer's have both of these properties."

In the UK Alzheimer's disease is a major problem and some financial companies have been taking advantage of customers with the condition by miss-selling policies as well as harassing them with constant doorstep salesmen. A report by Short Changed, showed that 62 per cent of sufferers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were being approached by cold callers or salespeople on their doorstep while 70 per cent were regularly called on the phone.

The Alzheimer's Society believes that victims have collectively lost £5 million and has called for better protection for people with the condition.

Whilst many believe that these companies are targeting sufferers as they see them as an easy target the new developments in drug and research technology shows that there may be light at the end of the tunnel for those suffering from dementia and other Alzheimer-related diseases.

written by Alex Franklin StortfordADNFCR-1780-ID-801240797-ADNFCR

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