The first brain damage in Alzheimer’s disease would develop even earlier than expected. The lesions currently being diagnosed are too late. This explains the failure of current treatments.
Every year, in France, 225,000 new cases of Alzheimer’s disease are nevertheless diagnosed. Yet there is still no cure for Alzheimer’s disease. But the reason is quite simple: the diagnosis is too late. The disease would start, in fact, much earlier than expected. Alzheimer’s disease should be treated even earlier than what is currently being done.
This is what had shown study published in The Journal of Neuroscience. Currently, treating Alzheimer’s disease is like treating osteoarthritis: it is too late to cure it, the lesions are in place. We can only do palliative treatment to try to slow it down because we cannot put on a “brain prosthesis”.
Amyloid plaques
To fully understand the issue of early diagnosis, remember that the beta-amyloid protein is the main component of amyloid plaques, a protein aggregate found around the neurons of people developing certain neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. The presence of amyloid plaques would notably decrease communication between neurons.
Based on this postulate, current approaches to early detection of Alzheimer’s disease are based on the classification of individuals as “positive” or “negative” according to the normality of this biomarker (and others of the same kind). If it is abnormal, the latest therapies are aimed at trying to dissolve the amyloid plaques, without success.
Need for early intervention
According to the study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, one of the causes of this failure would be that medicine would intervene too late. The researchers have just shown that the build-up of beta-amyloid protein begins very slowly, years before the biomarkers become abnormal.
These results thus confirm the need for early intervention against Alzheimer’s disease, even in people who have been classified as “negative” … but at a stage where one has not yet made a diagnostic mark. valid.
A blood test for diagnose Alzheimer 15 years before?
In early April, researchers developed a new blood test that could detect abnormal proteins circulating in the blood early in the disease process and up to 15 to 20 years before the usual diagnosis. Today, the tools for detecting Alzheimer’s disease are limited to costly or invasive examinations, and above all, too late: positron emission tomography (PET) and cerebrospinal fluid puncture.
The development of a minimally invasive blood biomarker for screening preclinical stages is therefore proving to be crucial. This new plasma biomarker would allow the early identification of Alzheimer’s disease with a sensitivity of 71% and a specific of 91%. It could also make it possible to identify people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, to pre-select individuals for a lumbar puncture or a PET scan, and to eliminate false-positive subjects.
Join the research cohorts
We may have effective drugs, but because we haven’t used them early enough, we don’t know. You may have the first abnormalities that will lead to the onset of Alzheimer’s lesions, but for lack of having looked for it, you do not know it. However, you can help research.
If you are over the age of 60, complaining of memory impairment, join the cohorts of early-stage patients that are emerging, such as that of the Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s disease (IM2A) at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. It involves closely following large numbers of people who have not been sick for several years and monitoring them with state-of-the-art blood and MRI scans. In addition, people who have risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease (multiple family history, genetic anomaly …) will receive “in preview”, potentially effective drugs.
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