2023-05-11 00:44:08
Scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom revealed on Wednesday that a drug recently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA in English) as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, helped “slow down memory loss.”
Researchers led by a team from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in the USA, published in the journal Neuron the results of an experimental study in which they showed the way in which the aggregates of the beta amyloid protein -essential for the transmission of the information between neurons – floats through brain tissue fluid, reaches many regions and can alter neuronal functioning.
Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most common forms of dementia, affects more than 50 million people worldwide, according to the Sinc news site.
For the moment, the possibilities of improvement are limited to mitigating the cognitive deterioration that the pathology brings with it in patients, mostly older than 65 years.
According to the scientists, the positive effect of the drug may be associated with its ability to adhere to those soluble beta-amyloid aggregates that contribute to neuronal dysfunction.
Last January the FDA approved lecanemab, an antibody therapy to treat Alzheimer’s, developed by the pharmaceutical companies Biogen (USA) and Eisai (Japan).
In a phase III trial this clinical approach had slowed cognitive decline in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease.
Dennis Selkoe, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-author of the paper, noted that this treatment was able to “slow down memory loss” in patients.
In presenting his conclusions, Selkoe assures that it is a “very timely” study because, “for the first time in the history of mankind, we have a product capable of treating Alzheimer’s patients to slow down their cognitive decline” .
The accumulation of amyloid beta peptides and the modification of the Tau protein constitute the known brain pathological phenomena related to Alzheimer’s.
Andrew Stern, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and first author of the study, Selkoe and his team were able to isolate the floating beta amyloid aggregates by immersing postmortem brain tissue from typical patients with the disease in saline solutions, which were then centrifuged at high speed. .
Thus, they found that the tiny aggregates of amyloid beta protein access important brain structures such as the hippocampus, which plays a fundamental role in memory.
The approval of the drug lecanemab by the FDA was carried out with controversy, as indicated by some international scientific publications, including Nature, through accelerated authorization, which is reserved for pathologies with few treatments.
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