Quest For Alzheimer’s Early Warning
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 3, No. 8
13 October - 10 November 2008 ]
Early detection of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia is the focus of a world-leading Australian consortium of researchers. Rebecca Scott reports.
Apart from climate change, ageing is the largest challenge facing Australia and the world in the next 50 years, according to University of Melbourne Professor of Psychiatry of Old Age David Ames.
Professor Ames, who heads the National Ageing Research Institute (NARI), is a leader in research into biomarkers, imaging and lifestyle in Alzheimer’s disease.
He says the goal of old age psychiatric research in the next few years is to develop an improved diagnostic blood test and a number of new treatments which can prevent and delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease – ensuring better quality of life for the aged.
Currently 200 000 people (1 per cent of the population) have dementia. By 2050 it is estimated 730 000 – or 2.8 per cent of the population – will have the disease.
Professor Ames is a lead researcher in the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and Lifestyle Study of Ageing (AIBL) which aims to track and investigate lifestyle risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, diet, and inadequate exercise, social connectedness and education.
The AIBL is a collaborative study between the University of Melbourne, Mental Health Research Institute, NARI, Neurosciences Australia, Austin Repatriation Hospital, Edith Cowan University and CSIRO.
The study – of some 1165 people aged between 60 and 96 – shows that apparently healthy people with a high level of beta-amyloid protein (the protein expressed profusely in the brain’s of people with Alzheimer’s disease) scored notably less well on cognitive testing than people with low levels of the protein.
“This suggests the clinical process of the disease is starting to manifest itself in a subtle way years before you ever get symptoms,” says Professor Ames.
He says study participants had PET brain scans and cognitive testing which involved all aspects of the brain’s cognitive function, including memory tests in which they were given a list of words, or a short story, to learn.
Tests also involved the inhibition of functions – of people’s natural response when trying to identify words and figures under a range of circumstances.
“What’s interesting in the cognitive testing is that the scores were well within the normal ranges, but people whose brains have got abnormal levels of proteins in them didn’t score as well on average as people who have normal levels.”
This is an important finding which will be critical to watch over the next five years to see if the participants develop clear-cut symptoms of Alzheimer’s and if so at what rate,” he says.
A second research approach led by Professor Colin Masters and Professor Ashley Bush at the Mental Health Research Institute involves the development of a compound which will inhibit the toxicity of a beta-amyloid protein in the brain.
Professor Ames says this work has completed phase two of a safety trial by University of Melbourne spin-off biotechnology company Prana and has been published in Lancet Neurology, reporting promising cognitive results in 78 Australian and Swedish subjects with Alzheimer’s disease.
Prana hopes to obtain financial backing to undertake a large-scale trial in 2009.
“By 2020 it is hoped the combined early detection tests and targeted treatments will be able to delay the onset of dementia by five years, moving the median age of onset from 80 to 85 years. The next few years look very promising,” says Professor Ames.
|
|
