Memory Loss No More

Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years. As of right now there are treatments for this disease, but there are no cures for it until now. Researchers at West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute recently performed their first procedure of a phase II clinical trial which uses focused ultrasound to treat a patient with early stage Alzheimer’s. An injection of microscopic bubbles is injected into the bloodstream and when hit with the focused ultrasound they temporarily cause the blood brain barriers to open at that specific brain region. This would allow doctors the ability to break the buildup of the plaques that block up the brain’s connectivity. I thought it was interesting that these plaques which come from amyloid precursor proteins are useful in the human body as a synapse regulator. When they are cleaved, they become the amyloid beta protein which when it aggregates causes this disease. The study did not mention much about that formation process, but I wonder if that should have been the next step to finding a cure rather than breaking the plaques. Would the breakup of those plaques, cause a re-occurrence of that buildup or worsen it? Although this is an amazing breakthrough, this is just the beginning trials of this procedure and would still need to be evaluated. One of the drawbacks of this procedure would be that it would only be beneficial to those with the early cases of Alzheimer’s, maybe this can pave the way to the reversal of the more damaging effects in severe cases.  

 https://wvumedicine.org/news/article/west-virginia-university-rockefeller-neuroscience-institute-pioneers-promising-new-alzheimer-s-thera/