Today's Top Alzheimer's News
September 19, 2013
Over $33 million announced in government Alzheimer's funding, new class of imaging agents developed to track Alzheimer's in real time, Fortune 500 companies commit to stopping Alzheimer's (read more).
- A September 18, 2013 New York Times article reported the National Institutes of Health announced the federal government's largest grant "to test an Alzheimer’s drug on healthy people at greatest risk for the most common form of the disease." According to the article, "The $33.2 million grant, and several other prevention studies awarded federal money in the last year, follow years of unsuccessful trials of treatments on people who already have dementia. Those failures have led to the realization that these drugs appear to be ineffective by the time memory and thinking problems have taken hold. At the same time, scientific advances have allowed researchers to identify people at risk for Alzheimer’s long before symptoms emerge." [Behind paywall - please find print article attached] Also covered by Boston Globe, USA Today, and Bloomberg among others.
- A September 18, 2013 CNET article reported on a new class of imaging agents that enable clinicians to watch the progression of Alzheimer's disease in real time in the brains of living patients. According to the article, "In their latest work on mice and humans, researchers were able to develop fluorescent compounds that bind to the tau proteins and then view them using positron emission tomography (PET) scans. Reporting in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Neuron, they write that they were able to watch the spread of tau tangles in the brain and that this spread correlated directly with the progression of moderate Alzheimer's disease."
- A September 18, 2013 Huffington Post article by Dr. Jessica Langbaum, principal scientist at the Banner Alzheimer's Institute, urged readers to join the Alzheimer's Prevention Registry. According to Dr. Langbaum, "I joined in honor of my grandfather who succumbed to the disease nearly two years ago. From birthdays and graduations, to weddings and children, our lives are filled with precious memories. But Alzheimer's has the power to erase them. Let your voice be heard. The memories you save could be your own."
- Fortune 500 Companies Commit to Accelerate Alzheimer's Prevention Research [Sacramento Bee] (9-18-13)