“So by developing a vaccine against a-beta it seems to work in the animals best if you give it before they get Alzheimer’s or dementia and it doesn’t work so well once they have developed the disease”, he said.
Advertisement
The cure for Alzheimer’s, the most common cause of dementia in the elderly, may be a reality soon as researchers in the USA and Australia have make a breakthrough finding in the quest towards discovering a new and potentially effective vaccine targeting the pathological proteins associated with disease that lead to brain degeneration. “This technology is a noninvasive way to identify Alzheimer’s disease before plaque is formed”.
Ordinarily, the only surefire way to confirm Alzheimer’s is by examining a person’s brain after they’ve died and finding these plaques and tangles.
Previous research on the many mechanisms that make up LOAD has been limited in scope and did not provide a complete picture of this complex disease.
After completion of these pre-clinical studies, they plan to test the immunogenicity and efficacy of the new vaccines in human trials. The researchers used positron emission tomography, also known as a PET scan, to look for the brain amyloid deposits three years after the trial ended.
Research on Alzheimer’s has largely focused on the characteristic proteins that build up in the brain in old age, but experimental drugs meant to target those symptoms have been disappointing. Light is shone into someone’s eyes, reaches the retina located in the back of the eye, and is reflected back to the device.
The study authors made inferences about brain development by comparing children at different ages.
Early diagnosis and effective treatment of Alzheimer’s disease remains one of the holy grails of medicine and huge amounts of study and money are being put into ways of reducing its impact on future ageing populations.
Exciting as these findings are, there’s still a lot more ground to cover.
Writing in the journal Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, researchers from the University of Minnesota say the discovery could pave the way for a noninvasive test for humans. Unlike the mice, thankfully, they won’t need to be anesthetized to sit still for the test.
Advertisement
Co-author of the latest paper, IMM Department of Molecular Immunology, Associate Professor Anahit Ghochikyan, says: “This study suggests that we can immunise patients at the early stages of AD, or even healthy people at risk for AD, using our anti-amyloid-beta vaccine, and, if the disease progresses, then vaccinate with another anti-tau vaccine to increase effectiveness”.
