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But researchers at the University of California Los Angeles said a new way of treating Alzheimer’s is showing promise for reversing some of that memory loss. The treatment combines western medicine with eastern philosophy. Dr. Dale Bredesen, with UCLA's Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, said nine of 10 patients suffering from either Alzheimer’s or other cognitive impairments saw improvements in their memory. He said the new therapy treats the patients holistically, unlike traditional treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. “They have either taken a single drug, monotherapy, to try with Alzheimer’s and that has been a failure repeatedly, or they have tried without any sort of background simply saying, 'Okay, try exercise, try changing your diet,' these sorts of things, and there has not been any way to understand how these things contribute to the disease,” Bredesen said.
A 55-year-old attorney who does not want her identity revealed because she suffered from progressive memory loss associated with early Alzheimer’s and still works is one of 10 patients who received a new therapy to treat memory loss. "I could not remember conversations that I'd had with my kids and my husband. I started having to refer to my calendar all the time,” she said. “I now have much more confidence in my work and am not afraid that I will forget something. I don't have to rely on my lists. I don't have to write everything down.”
Bredesen said there is a constant balance of the brain remembering and forgetting. He said many factors, including lifestyle, can create an imbalance in brain activity, leading to memory loss. “We identified 36 different parts of this network that contribute to the imbalance. So when you are chronically on the wrong side of that balance, you are in fact pulling apart the connections instead of making them. Then, in the long run, that can lead to Alzheimer’s disease.” The different elements include a person's diet, exercise and sleep habits. Through brain imaging, blood work and lifestyle questions, Bredesen creates an individualized therapy for each patient.
Treatments include lifestyle changes and even medications or supplements. He described this new therapy as combining western understanding of the human body with the eastern approach of looking at the whole patient. “What we’re using is a combination that brings these two together to create a new kind of physician that is doing a different kind of medicine who understands the basis of molecular genetics, but also understands the need to bring things together in a network fashion,” Bredesen said. He said for the nine patients experiencing improvement, it typically came within three to six months. He said the 10th patient was too far along in the disease to see results. The UCLA center is now working with 30 additional patients as it moves to expand its research.
Study Holistic Approach to Alzheimer s Treatment May Reverse Memory Loss
In September, life science company Calico, which was set up by Google last year to investigate aging, joined with U.S. drugmaker AbbVie in committing $250 million apiece to developing cures for age-related diseases. Away from the limelight, however, Switzerland's Novartis and Denmark's Novo Nordisk are already testing new roles for existing drugs, which could keep people alive for longer, as they look to cater to the ever larger numbers living into their 80s and beyond. "Everybody now is talking about the aging population and how to have a healthy old age," said Mads Krogsgaard Thomsen, chief science officer at Novo Nordisk. By 2020, people age 60 or older will outnumber children younger than 5 for the first time in history, according to a paper published Thursday in the Lancet, a medical journal. But with greater age comes a bigger burden of disease.
A Novo Nordisk employee controls a machine at an insulin production line in a plant in Kalundborg, Denmark
At least 300 million people will suffer from diabetes by 2025, the World Health Organization estimates, while the global number of dementia sufferers is expected to triple to 135 million by 2050. The goal is not to create some "elixir of life" pill to help people live ever longer, but rather to maximize healthy lifespan and reduce the period of end-of-life sickness and dependency. Alex Zhavoronkov, chief executive of Baltimore-based biotech company Insilico Medicine, believes shifting health care spending from treatment to prevention will be central to this. "Instead of trying to keep a person alive for another three to six months and essentially bankrupting health care systems, it might make sense to introduce drugs that prevent the onset of age-related diseases and aging itself," he said.
Immune system booster
Research into anti-aging drugs has historically received little attention from big pharmaceutical companies, given the difficulties of running clinical trials to prove such an effect. Moreover, companies have been deterred by regulators in the United States and Europe, who will approve medicines only for specific illnesses and not for something as broad as aging, which is not in itself defined as a treatable disease. Despite these obstacles, Novartis has completed a successful pilot trial examining its cancer drug everolimus as a potential treatment to reverse immunosenescence, or the gradual deterioration of the immune system that occurs with age and is a major cause of disease and death. Encouraged by studies showing that the closely related drug rapamycin extended the lifespan of worms, flies and mice, Novartis looked for ways to assess whether everolimus could have a similar effect in humans.
The hurdles were high. Aging is a gradual, decades-long process, making it impractical to assess directly in clinical trials. "For aging you have to pick a target system that can be investigated in months or years, not decades," said Novartis' head of research, Mark Fishman. The company's work-around is to focus on immunosenescence. It gave 218 people 65 or older a six-week course of everolimus, followed by a regular flu vaccine after two weeks. Results showed that taking the drug improved the immune system response by more than 20 percent compared with taking a placebo, potentially opening the door to use it as a treatment to increase the efficacy of vaccines and help stave off the infections associated with old age. While Fishman stresses the research is still in its early stage, Novartis' work highlights the growing interest in aging as a biological process that can be manipulated, treated and delayed.
Old drugs, new purpose
In a study reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers describe how a synthetic drug, called antisense oligoneucleotide, reduced the production and in some cases cleared clumps of tau in the brain. Tau bundles are one of the hallmarks of the disease, along with beta amyloid deposits, another destructive protein. By stopping the formation of tau, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, found they could extend the lives of mice that were bred to have collections of human tau in their brains.
An image shows activity in a human brain. Scientists have developed a drug capable of sweeping away abnormal protein clumps in the brain which are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
Lead author Sara DeVos said scientists saw an improvement in their condition. “So these mice die earlier than normal. So when we treat with our drug, the mice live longer and we can also prevent neurons from dying. So if we give this drug, the neurons will no longer die as a result of these tau bundles,” said DeVos The investigators also tested the compound in monkeys and saw positive results.
Human testing expected soon
Antisense oligneucleotide targets the genetic instructions for building tau. The molecule binds to messenger RNA, which carries out the DNA blueprint for life, preventing tau from being produced. The drug can be made to target RNA for destruction of any protein, said scientists. Tim Miller, a professor of neurology at Washington University and senior author of the study, hopes the drug, developed with Ionis Pharmaceuticals, will soon be tested in humans with Alzheimer’s disease. “The most exciting and most interesting ... is to apply this to people who we presume have abnormal tau to test the hypothesis whether lowering tau in those people will be of benefit to those people,” he said.
Patients with Alzheimer's and dementia are seen during a therapy session. Alzheimer's afflicts an estimated 44 million people around the world.
Other types of antisense oligoneucleotides have been approved by U.S. regulators and are being used to treat the neurodegenerative disease muscular dystrophy and spinal muscular atrophy. The compound is in clinical trials for Huntington’s disease and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Because tau deposits are only a piece of the puzzle that causes Alzheimer’s, the investigators envision using the drug with other treatments, also in development. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, which primarily strikes senior adults, leading to a decline in mental functioning and eventually death.
New Drug Takes on Alzheimer’s by Sweeping for Protein Clumps
Specifically, researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia say extra-virgin olive oil “protects memory and learning ability and reduces the formation of amyloid-beta plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain – classic markers of Alzheimer's disease.” Researcher say olive oil reduced inflammation and triggers a process called autophagy, which helps broken down cells to flush intracellular debris and toxins. This includes amyloid plaques and tau tangles, the latter of which is associated with memory loss in Alzheimer’s. “Brain cells from mice fed diets enriched with extra-virgin olive oil had higher levels of autophagy and reduced levels of amyloid plaques and phosphorylated tau,” said senior investigator Domenico Praticò.
For their study, the researchers looked at mice with three traits of Alzheimer’s: memory impairment, amyloid plaques, and neurofibrillary tangles. The mice were put into two groups, one group got a diet enriched with extra-virgin olive oil, while the other group received a normal diet. The olive oil was given to the mice when they were only six months old and before any symptoms of Alzheimer’s set in. While there was no difference in the appearance of the mice, at age 9 months and 12 months, the mice in the olive oil group “performed significantly better on tests designed to evaluate working memory, spatial memory, and learning abilities.”
Olive oil, according to a new study, could help stave off Alzheimer's disease.
An analysis of the brain tissue of the mice revealed more differences. “One thing that stood out immediately was synaptic integrity,” Praticò said. The integrity of the connections between neurons, known as synapses, were preserved in animals on the extra-virgin olive oil diet. In addition, compared to mice on a regular diet, brain cells from animals in the olive oil group showed a dramatic increase in nerve-cell autophagy activation, which ultimately was responsible for the reduction in levels of amyloid plaques and phosphorylated tau.”
Next, researchers plan to see what happens to mice who are given olive oil at 12 months, when they are already showing symptoms. “Usually when a patient sees a doctor for suspected symptoms of dementia, the disease is already present,” Praticò added. “We want to know whether olive oil added at a later time point in the diet can stop or reverse the disease.” The study was published online June 21 in the Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology.
Study: Olive Oil Protects Brain From Alzheimer’s
Eh, sometimes people just get old and get old-timers.
Crossword puzzles are a good preventative, I've noticed.
