Alzheimer's Clinical Trial

In Alzheimer's disease, healthy brain tissue degenerates, causing a steady decline in memory and mental abilities. About 5 percent of people between the ages of 65 and 74 have Alzheimer's disease, while nearly half the people over the age of 85 have Alzheimer's. Although there is no cure, treatments may improve the quality of life for people with Alzheimer's disease.

What Causes Alzheimer's Disease ?

While the causes of Alzheimer's are poorly understood, its effect on brain tissue is clear. Alzheimer's disease damages and kills brain cells. Two types of brain cell (neuron) damage are common in people who have Alzheimer's:

Plaques. Clumps of a normally harmless protein called beta-amyloid may interfere with communication between brain cells. Although the ultimate cause of neuron death in Alzheimer's is not known, mounting evidence suggests that the abnormal processing of beta-amyloid protein may be the culprit.
Tangles. The internal support structure for brain cells depends on the normal functioning of a protein called "tau". In people with Alzheimer's, threads of tau protein undergo alterations that cause them to become twisted. Many researchers believe this may seriously damage neurons, causing them to die.

Alzheimer's Symptoms

Memory loss: Everyone has occasional lapses in memory, but the memory problems associated with Alzheimer's disease persist and worsen. People with Alzheimer's may repeat things, often forget conversations or appointments, routinely misplace things, often putting them in illogical locations, eventually forget the names of family members and everyday objects.
Problems with abstract thinking: People with Alzheimer's may initially have trouble balancing their checkbook, a problem that progresses to trouble recognizing and dealing with numbers.
Difficulty finding the right word: It may be a challenge for those with Alzheimer's to find the right words to express thoughts or even follow conversations. Eventually, reading and writing also are affected.
Disorientation: People with Alzheimer's disease often lose their sense of time and dates, and may find themselves lost in familiar surroundings.
Loss of judgment: Solving everyday problems, such as knowing what to do if food on the stove is burning, becomes increasingly difficult, eventually impossible. Alzheimer's is characterized by greater difficulty in doing things that require planning, decision making and judgment.
Difficulty performing familiar tasks: Once-routine tasks that require sequential steps, such as cooking, become a struggle as the disease progresses. Eventually, people with advanced Alzheimer's may forget how to do even the most basic things.
Personality changes: People with Alzheimer's may exhibit mood swings, distrust in others, increased stubbornness, social withdrawal, depression, anxiety, and/or aggressiveness.

Alzheimer's Treatment

Currently, there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease. Doctors sometimes prescribe drugs to improve signs and symptoms that often accompany Alzheimer's, including sleeplessness, wandering, anxiety, agitation and depression. But only two varieties of medications have been proved to slow the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's.

Cholinesterase inhibitors, such as donepezil (Aricept), rivastigmine (Exelon) and galantamine (Razadyne), work by improving the levels of neurotransmitters in the brain. Donepezil improves mental function (such as memory, attention, social interaction, reasoning and language abilities, and ability to perform activities of daily living) by increasing the amount of a certain naturally occurring substance in the brain. Donepezil may improve the ability to think and remember or slow the loss of these abilities in people who have AD. But cholinesterase inhibitors don't work for everyone. As many as half the people who take these drugs show no improvement. Other people may choose to stop taking the drugs because of the side effects, which include diarrhea, nausea and vomiting.
Memantine (Namenda) is the first drug approved to treat moderate to severe stages of Alzheimer's. Memantine protects brain cells from damage caused by the chemical messenger glutamate. It sometimes is used in combination with a cholinesterase inhibitor. Memantine's most common side effect is dizziness, although it also appears to increase agitation and delusional behavior in some people.

Pharmaceutical companies are continuing to develop new and improved Alzheimer's medications. Prior to FDA approval, the only way to receive these medications is to participate in an Alzheimer's disease research study.