Imaging tests may be able to detect the early signs of Alzheimer's disease long before it begins to affect memory, a finding that may lead to earlier, more effective treatments, U.S. researchers said on December 14. They said healthy people who have an abnormal build-up of a protein in the brain linked with Alzheimer's disease have a higher risk of developing the disease.
"Our paper shows for the time that people who during life are known to have amyloid plaques in the brain-the plaques of Alzheimer's disease-have a very high risk of developing dementia in just a few years," said John Morris, director of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, whose study appears in the journal Archives of Neurology.
Several teams have been working on better ways to detect early-stage Alzheimer's disease in hopes of developing drugs that can fight it before it causes too much damage. "That made us think that trying to treat people who have the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease may not meet with much success since we are trying to treat a brain that already has substantial damage"
He said all of the treatments that have been tried or are being tested have failed so far to make a significant impact on Alzheimer's disease, a mind-robbing form of dementia that affects more than 26 million people globally.
The hope is that by finding a way to identify patients earlier, it may be possible to stage clinical trials for drugs more likely to work. For many years, scientists have known that about a third of people in their 70s or 80s who showed no signs of having Alzheimer's disease had a significant build-up of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain, Morris said. That suggested the disease was active long before clinical symptoms showed up. But short of an autopsy, it was difficult to find such patients.