Scientists in Germany said they had developed a drug that halts the progress of Alzheimer’s disease in mice and hope to begin tests on humans in two years’ time.
The treatment, which they described as immunisation, employs a new antibody to stop brain degeneration.
The findings were announced by the medical department of the University of Goettingen where an international team included Dutch and Finnish scientists.
The paper was published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Alzheimer’s disease
A spokesman, Thomas Bayer, said the findings from the laboratory-mouse experiments could be applied to humans too and it was assumed that tests on human Alzheimer’s patients would begin within two years.
The treatment is novel because the antibodies are not aimed against the so-called amyloid plaques which clog the brains of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Instead they counter molecular structures in the brain that produce a protein, pyroglutamate abeta.
The team believes that this protein is what causes dementia.
Bayer said past therapies had tried to destroy the plaques, but this had grave side-effects.
“You have to consider the plaques as a kind of garbage can for the abeta protein and leave them in peace so you don’t spread the poison,” he said. It made more sense to stop the poison being generated in the first place.
“We probably can’t cure Alzheimer’s with this type of passive immunisation, but the research results prove that antibodies can halt its progress,” he said.
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A new Johns Hopkins-led research has found that high cholesterol levels in middle age do not appear to increase women’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia later in life.
It found that women whose cholesterol levels decline from middle age to old age are at 2.5 times greater risk of developing the memory-wasting diseases than those whose cholesterol stayed the same or increased over the years.
“Our research refutes the notion that high cholesterol in midlife is a risk factor for Alzheimer”s disease, at least among women,” said Michelle M. Mielke, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the study”s lead author.
As part of the study, the women were given physical exams, heart tests, chest x-rays and blood tests. The group was also surveyed for smoking habits, alcohol and medication use, education and medical history.
Women were assessed for dementia throughout the 32 years of follow-up between 1968 and 2001. In 2001, 161 of the original group had been diagnosed with Alzheimer”s or other forms of dementia, but the youngest group was just reaching age 70.
Mielke says that later in life, women with slightly higher body mass index, higher levels of cholesterol and higher blood pressure tend to be healthier overall than those whose weight, cholesterol and blood pressure are too low.
But it is unclear whether “too low” cholesterol, BMI and blood pressure are risk factors for dementia or if they could be signs that dementia is developing, she said. For example, an inadvertent loss of weight often precedes the development of dementia, she said, but the exact cause is unclear.
The research has been published online in the journal Neurology.