New Alzheimer's Treatment Fully Restores Memory Function For Mice 109
New submitter wrp103 writes Australian researchers have come up with a non-invasive ultrasound technology [abstract] that clears the brain of neurotoxic amyloid plaques — structures that are responsible for memory loss and a decline in cognitive function in Alzheimer's patients. A slice: Publishing in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes the technique as using a particular type of ultrasound called a focused therapeutic ultrasound, which non-invasively beams sound waves into the brain tissue. By oscillating super-fast, these sound waves are able to gently open up the blood-brain barrier, which is a layer that protects the brain against bacteria, and stimulate the brain’s microglial cells to move in. Microglila cells are basically waste-removal cells, so once they get past the blood-brain barrier, they’re able to clear out the toxic beta-amyloid clumps before the blood-brain barrier is restored within a few hours.
The team reports fully restoring the memories of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue. They found that the treated mice displayed improved performance in three memory tasks - a maze, a test to get them to recognise new objects, and one to get them to remember the places they should avoid.
and then they get flowers? (Score:2, Insightful)
shortly after their human friend dies.
Re: and then they get flowers? (Score:5, Informative)
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IIRC, he still had his lucky penny.
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WTF AM I DOING HERE! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WTF AM I DOING HERE! (Score:5, Interesting)
There will be the somewhat interested medical-ethics question of what to do after it(or some other treatment) is first demonstrated to work: Since there will already be a substantial population of Alzheimer's patients, who have lost varying degrees of prior memory and memory function because no (effective) treatment was available; there will be people, probably a lot of them (10s of thousands or more, in all likelihood, counting only countries wealthy enough that treating them is even on the table as a possibility) who have already irreplaceably lost much or all of their past memories; but could be treated such that they would remember subsequent events.
I imagine that, on the plus side, such treatment would decrease the confusion, fear, and substantial helplessness that such patients face; but that coming back with capacity for new memories but little or nothing about the past has its own challenges.
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Yes, having had a similar experience, it really is like time travel in many ways. Alzheimers patients really travel back through time. It's not just that they remember it, in their minds they are actually living in that time in the past as their present... and that time point goes further and further back as the disease progresses. It's very discomforting to witness.
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My mother has Alz, which has become severe now. I think she still remembers me, but maybe not. It's hard to really know. She doesn't know anyone's name anymore, and her speech has become fragmentary.
Big Pharma may have caused or contributed to her condition. About 15 years ago, this Hormone Replacement Therapy, for women only, became quite popular. My mother was given this treatment. Then some more information about HRT came out. Seems the treatment doubles the risk of the patient developing dement
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Yes, this will be interesting - but the results may not be as scary as you might think. Assuming this pans out (the first three letters of the word assume are...) and the results are clinically apparent, even a modest benefit would save 'the system' quite a bit of money. Alzehiemer's patients are very expensive to maintain. They live for years, they can be otherwise healthy. They need a lot of human supervision (which doesn't come cheap).
So even if the equipment manufacturers charge and arm and leg for
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I can't think of any scenario where being cured and missing memories is in any way better than still missing those memories but having your brain slowly being eaten away and losing even more memories.
These are already confused and sickly old people.. curing them if such a thing is possible will mean that they can eventually become less confused. Probably with a lot of therapy and rehab, similar to what we do after significant physical trauma leaves a person's body incapacitated.
But absolutely, the people w
Re: WTF AM I DOING HERE! (Score:2)
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Do we know for sure that they have "lost" their memories, and haven't instead lost the ability to access the memories? At least the cliched "they sometimes remember their kids" moments seem to imply the latter.
Computer analogy: The hard drive's still there, but not plugged in.
Car analogy: The gas tank's full, but the fuel line is plugged.
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, my pr0n erased,
NOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooo!
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Thats what backups are for.
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Strange. I never thought about "forgetting". But my passwords and records will be recoverable after my death by means of a divided secret and just for kicks, solving a puzzle.
Tell me, A.C., why do you think there is a problem?
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Well, the only thing I have that might remotely be classified as pr0n would be my personal sketches as I like to draw nudes. There are no other images. Since they are my personal artistic output they might have some value to my family and perhaps not. None are obscene anyway.
But the split/shared secret is easy to set up. Trivial in fact. I am not sure why you think it is "extensive".
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Well, I understood the thread to be about pr0n and other things. More particularly, it was about how you would recover your digital property if you were to lose and partly recover your memory.
I have nothing on any hard disk nor any memory stick (or its ilk) that I am ashamed of. I am a human being (I figured that out long ago) and not perfect. But I actually do not have anything I feel I need to hide. My kids figured out my fetishes in their teens, nothing to hide there. I would say that there would b
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You are mistaken.
You are also abusive. I would say "have a nice life" but I know that will not be so unless you change markedly.
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And the above problem is something that people WITHOUT any disease have to deal with...
PS: Personal opinion: You have a flash car, pool boy and so are rich and just escaped a horrible death? My heart bleeds for you...not...
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The team reports fully restoring the memories of 75 percent of the mice they tested it on, with zero damage to the surrounding brain tissue.
The abstract mentioning completely clearing amyloid plaques in 75% of the mice, which, while awesome, is not fully restoring memory.
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Presumably this would be done in a sterile room and that the patient would need to be cleared for any potentially hazardous bacterial infections and the such.
They noted that the BBB is restored within a few hours. Assuredly not a 100% safe treatment to be sure, but that's hardly new in medical science (think of all the potential side-effects listed with every medication. Never mind things like full body irradiation as prep for bone marrow transplants, cutting up (or even out) pieces of the brain to reduce
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Presumably this would be done in a sterile room and that the patient would need to be cleared for any potentially hazardous bacterial infections and the such.
They noted that the BBB is restored within a few hours. Assuredly not a 100% safe treatment to be sure, but that's hardly new in medical science (think of all the potential side-effects listed with every medication. Never mind things like full body irradiation as prep for bone marrow transplants, cutting up (or even out) pieces of the brain to reduce seizures and so on.)
Sometimes the cure is worth taking some risks. Of course "sometimes" isn't the same as "always" and it would need to be determined case by case based on the patient's other co-existing conditions, the will of the family, financial situation, etc.
They are using sound waves. It may be non-invasive and require little more than shaving the target point and applying a lubricant to the skin.
Though, if they are going through the skull there is a VAST difference in what will get through a mouse skull from what will get through a human skull.
Opening the head up to get it done... well that's sort of going to cause other problems so the treatment won't be ethical / used due to risks elsewhere.
Vernor Vinge's "Rainbow's End" (Score:2)
There's starting to be some interesting science fiction about the problems of what happens when we can cure Alzheimer's.
And I suspect Sir Terry Pratchett would have volunteered to try this if they'd announced it a few months earlier.
Put me in line (Score:1)
Why teh fuck did I start this? Oh yeah. I'm game. I need my brain to be ultrasounded asap.
Mouse brains are tiny. (Score:2, Informative)
Just as a rough comparison, a mouse brain weighs 0.4 g, a human brain 1320 g. So right off the bat I'd be skeptical of whether this could be scaled up to treat humans. But still, it's a very interesting result.
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How much does a bird brain weigh, but they're such good musicians, and migrate thousands of miles?
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They are smaller no doubt, but in both cases the blood brain barrier is just beneath the surface of the skull
No it's not. It's formed by the endothelium (thin layer one cell thick that is in direct contact with the cerebral blood stream) on the smallest capillaries that penetrate deep into the brain matter.
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I'm not saying this is bad science; it sounds like great science. I'm just saying the geometry and scale are very different so people shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this will immediately lead to usable therapies for humans.
When I was a student I took a course where we got to handle a variety of vertebrate brains, including human ones. When you hold a human brain in your hand the first impression (other than awe) is that it's not terribly big. But it's huge compared to the brain of a small animal, a
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Just a few semesters of brain science at MIT before I chose a different major.
Re:Simple Request (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read and understood TFS you would note that they indeed make this inference. You'd have to read the paper to see the details.
You might want to look at an accompanying editorial for more details [sciencemag.org] but here is some additional info:
The blood-brain barrier, a tightly packed layer of cells that lines the brain's blood vessels, protects it from infections, toxins, and other threats but makes the organ frustratingly hard to treat. A strategy that combines ultrasound with microscopic blood-borne bubbles can briefly open the barrier, in theory giving drugs or the immune system access to the brain. In the clinic and the lab, that promise is being evaluated.
This month, in one of the first clinical tests, Todd Mainprize, a neurosurgeon at the University of Toronto in Canada, hopes to use ultrasound to deliver a dose of chemotherapy to a malignant brain tumor. And in some of the most dramatic evidence of the technique's potential, a research team reports this week in Science Translational Medicine that they used it to rid mice of abnormal brain clumps similar to those in Alzheimer's disease, restoring lost memory and cognitive functions. If such findings can be translated from mice to humans, “it will revolutionize the way we treat brain disease,” says biophysicist Kullervo Hynynen of the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, who originated the ultrasound method.
Some scientists stress that rodent findings can be hard to translate to humans and caution that there are safety concerns about zapping the brain with even the low-intensity ultrasound used in the new study, which is similar to that used in diagnostic scans. Opening up the blood-brain barrier just enough to get a beneficial effect without scorching tissue, triggering an excessive immune reaction, or causing hemorrhage is the “crux,” says Brian Bacskai, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who studies Alzheimer's disease and used to work with Hynynen.
My emphasis.
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Another overblown cure. The amyloid plaques are associated with permanent damage (ie. actual neuron loss), so you won't cure anyone by removing all of the plaques. You'd have to regrow neurons, and only certain portions of the brain can do that - even if you did, you'd still have to relearn and get new memories.
That might be a good thing. We do that all the time and memories lost from the last are not necessarily a bad thing. If you can restore function and record new memories, that would be a huge improvement.
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Another overblown cure. The amyloid plaques are associated with permanent damage (ie. actual neuron loss), so you won't cure anyone by removing all of the plaques. You'd have to regrow neurons, and only certain portions of the brain can do that - even if you did, you'd still have to relearn and get new memories.
In other words, like a damaged hard drive, fixing the heads doesn't bring back the lost data.
Further, the ultrasound can't penetrate the brain the way it can with a mouse, so the treatment won't work for humans.
Then, it also doesn't address the cause of the plaques, which is thought to be a diabetes-like process that will continue.
Obviously you don't wait until the person has become non-functional.
You do this to prevent the future progress of Alzheimers, or even as a preventative.
You begin the treatment as soon as evidence of the plaques occurs, or even better, do it as part of regular checkups. Perhaps every 5 years would suffice because generally speaking, the progress of Alzheimer's is slow.
The best part of this is that it may be a relatively inexpensive preventative treatment. Prevention is far far more important than cure.
As for
A money-saver (Score:2)
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We used repeated scanning ultrasound (SUS) treatments of the mouse brain to remove A, without the need for any additional therapeutic agent such as anti-A antibody. Spinning disk confocal microscopy and high-resolution three-dimensional reconstruction revealed extensive internalization of A into the lysosomes of activated microglia in mouse brains subjected to SUS, with no concomitant increase observed in the number of microglia. Plaque burden was reduced in SUS-treated AD mice compared to sham-treated animals, and cleared plaques were observed in 75% of SUS-treated mice.
... so I'm hoping that there's "something there" and want to see the results replicated by others.
Amazing! (Score:1)
scientific studies (Score:1)
I'm sorry (Score:2)
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Slashdot reports on an obscure mice experiment... (Score:2)
while there is right now a really promising result from Biogen, in clinical trials on humans:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102521170
THAT is news. Not some un-vetted academic work, interesting as it might be, which will need at least 10 more years of experimentation before human trials, if this approach does not die before (at least 98% probability, but of course I wish the researchers luck).
I think Slashdot needs more expertise in selecting science stories.
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Well, Biogen's drug may have its place but it isn't exactly a Speedy Gonzales, and its side-effects include brain swelling.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ma... [forbes.com]
"Wall Street analysts predict could get the drug to market by 2020"
Also, this research is more elegant - it uses your blood's own cleanup cells to fight the plaques, versus injecting you with a foreign antibody like Biogen's does.
amazing (Score:1)
Brain blood barrier (Score:4, Interesting)
The brain blood barrier is not just a fence against bacterias (evolution would have gave us blood barriers for other critical organs). It is also there to prevent neurotransmitters to leak or to break in.
For instance, eating dopamine does not increase dopamine in the brain. If you want to increase dopamine, you can either take a drug that prevent it from being cleared, or eat a precursor that can cross the barrier like Tyrosine, or closer, L-dopa, but here the brain remain capable to regulate dopamine increase.
Good news... (Score:2)
This is one of the first things that promise to be effective. Of course, it will still take a decade or so to be safe, but given the tremendous loss Alzheimer patients face, even significant risk would be worth it.
Good News (Score:1)
I can't be the only one curious... (Score:1)
I really, really want to see that third test.
You know (Score:1)
This looks great, but the insurance companies have been blocking advanced treatments like this for years because they don't want to pay for it. Maybe we'll see it in Europe or the UK with the NHS, but here in the States nobody will want to pay for it.