Scientists About to Find the Cure to Alzheimer’s Disease

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Alzheimer’s disease is a life-changing disease. The patient suffering from Alzheimer’s starts losing his memory and begins to get confused in the trivial things like thinking, speaking or just holding things. Currently, 5 million people in the US live with this disease. The disease is the leading cause of dementia.

At present, there are no remedies for Alzheimer’s and scientist are yet to find the exact cause of the disease. However, a group of scientists have noticed sticky clumps of beta-amyloid, a protein, in the brains of people died of the disease. To date, this protein has been a prime research topic.

There have been many trials of drug targeting beta-amyloid but all were unsuccessful. Some scientists believe the reason behind these unsuccessful attempts is that the treatment procedure began too late for the drug to work. They believe that Alzheimer’s starts any years before it is first diagnosed and people are too late to start getting treatment. This makes the early stages of the disease a critical one and is important to intervene with remedies in this situation.

To proceed with the research, researchers from the Tokyo Medical and Dental University began observing at the initial stage of the cognitive weakening called mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

MCI warns that the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease can make you forget names and lose things more than usual. Researchers contemplate this to be the early part of the whole process of Alzheimer’s disease but this may not be always the case.

The researchers were able to find out if an individual neuron died because of Alzheimer’s disease and also which neuron is in which stage of the process.

“Neuronal death is obviously very important in the development of Alzheimer’s but is

notoriously difficult to detect in real-time because dying cells cannot be stained using chemical or immunohistological methods,” explains the lead author of the study, Hikari Tanaka.

“This discovery might change the amyloid hypothesis,” says senior author Hitoshi Okazawa.