The findings suggest -- for the first time in a clinical trial -- that early treatment to remove amyloid plaques from the brain many years before symptoms arise can delay the onset of Alzheimer's dementia
Washington DC [US], March 20 (ANI): A new
study has found that an experimental drug appears to reduce the risk of
Alzheimer' s-related dementia in people destined to develop the disease in
their 30s, 40s, or 50s.
The
findings suggest -- for the first time in a clinical trial -- that early
treatment to remove amyloid plaques from the brain many years before symptoms
arise can delay the onset of Alzheimer's dementia.
The study has been published in The Lancet Neurology.
The international
study involved 73 people with rare, inherited genetic mutations that cause the
overproduction of amyloid in the brain, all but guaranteeing that they will
develop Alzheimer's disease in middle age.
For a
subgroup of 22 participants who had no cognitive problems at the study's start
and who received the drug the longest -- an average of eight years -- the
treatment lowered the risk of developing symptoms from essentially 100% to
about 50%, according to a primary analysis of the data and supported by
multiple sensitivity analyses supporting the trend.
"Everyone in this study was destined
to develop Alzheimer's disease and some of them haven't yet," said senior
author Randall J. Bateman, MD, the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished
Professor of Neurology at WashU Medicine.
"We
don't yet know how long they will remain symptom-free -- maybe a few years or
maybe decades. In order to give them the best opportunity to stay cognitively
normal, we have continued treatment with another anti-amyloid antibody in hopes
they will never develop symptoms at all. What we do know is that it's possible
at least to delay the onset of the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease and give
people more years of healthy life."
The findings provide new evidence to support the so-called amyloid hypothesis
of Alzheimer's disease, which posits that the first step on the road to
dementia is the build-up of amyloid plaques in the brain and that removing such
plaques or blocking their formation can stop symptoms from arising.
For this
study, Bateman and colleagues evaluated the effects of an experimental
anti-amyloid drug to see if the medication could prevent the development of
dementia.
The study
population consisted of people who had originally enrolled in the Knight Family
DIAN-TU-001, the first Alzheimer's prevention trial in the world, and then
continued into an extension of the trial in which they received an anti-amyloid
drug.
Currently
led by Bateman and funded primarily by the Alzheimer's Association, GHR
Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Knight Family DIAN-TU-001
was launched in 2012 to evaluate anti-amyloid drugs as preventive therapies for
Alzheimer's disease.
All
participants in the trial had no to very mild cognitive decline, and were
within 15 years before to 10 years after their expected age of Alzheimer's
onset, based on family history.
Analysis of this data set
revealed that removal of brain amyloid plaques years before symptoms are expected
to arise delayed symptom onset and dementia progression, although the results
were only statistically significant for the subgroup of people who started with
no symptoms and were treated the longest. (ANI)
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