Alzheimer’s Disease has been blamed on the build-up of two particularly nasty proteins in the brain: beta-amyloid and tau. Amyloid accumulates in plaques outside neurons, while tau twists into tangles inside. These are the characteristic plaques and tangles seen in the post-mortem Alzheimer’s brain.
One in three people living past 85 get Alzheimer’s Disease. There is no cure, and patients are faced with an inexorable decline that nothing can stop but death. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS, is one of very few treatments that might alter this grim trajectory.
For the first time in 20 years, the United States FDA has approved a new drug for Alzheimer\’s disease, news that brought both celebration and dismay. While patients and families suddenly glimpse hope, many researchers dismiss that hope as illusory.
New drugs to treat Alzheimer’s are desperately needed – but new drugs are extremely hard to find. The team here at Neurocentrix are trialling several promising drugs and are all-too familiar with the long and painstaking process needed to bring a medication to the market.
Alzheimer’s disease features the build-up of two distinct proteins in the brain: beta-amyloid, which accumulates in clumps, and tau, in tangles. But how exactly they relate to each other and the death of neurons has remained a mystery – perhaps until now.
At medical school we learnt very few certainties. Everything was a possibility, a probability, a risk, a trend, a likelihood. There were many rules of thumb, but very few rules. Yet amongst all the qualified circumspection, there was one iron-clad law: The human brain grows no new neurons. All the neurons we would ever have were present at birth, and from there it was all rapidly downhill for our neuron tally.
