Alzheimer's: An Epidemic: Saving Brains, Saving Lives

Ivanhoe Broadcast News
Friday, May 25, 2007; 4:15 AM

LOS ANGELES (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- There's no cure for Alzheimer's, but even if there were, researchers say it wouldn't help unless patients were diagnosed early enough. Right now, the only way to prove whether a person has the disease is through an autopsy, but that could change with the introduction of two new techniques that could identify the disease before symptoms start.

Their faces tell stories they can't recall...

"I just don't remember anything, period," Ray, an Alzheimer's patient says.

Time seems lost forever...

"Sometimes, I think, 'What is today?'" says Alzheimer's patient Jenny Johnson.

Their most precious memories disappear in the blink of an eye.

"[I think,] 'Oh my God, how am I related to this person? Wow.'"

Alzheimer's is the enemy. It affects five million Americans, and there's no cure -- partly because the disease isn't diagnosed soon enough.

"What happens today is, people get a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease after they've had it for several years, and so I think we do too little, too late," says Gary Small, M.D., a geriatric psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine.

But now, Dr. Small and his colleagues at UCLA have developed a new imaging technique that detects the disease even before symptoms start. "So, years before a person would actually have symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, we could detect it," Dr. Small says.

Here's how it works: A small molecule is made in this machine, and injected into patients right before they have a brain scan. The molecule binds to abnormal proteins in the brain -- allowing doctors to see the spots where Alzheimer's starts to form.

This image shows a normal brain. A few years later, you can see the same person has the very beginning stages of Alzheimer's (a condition called "mild cognitive impairment"). Finally, it's evident the have a full-blown case of Alzheimer's.

"This suggests that it may be possible to have some screening approach with people who are very normal, and they may get a test like this, and they may get started on medicine so they may live a long life and never get Alzheimer's," Dr. Small says. If proven effective, experts say the 50 new medicines that are currently in clinical trials could be administered to people before symptoms of Alzheimer's are present.