Breakthrough in Alzhiemer treatment reported
A new drug could prove at least twice as effective in treating Alzheimer’s disease as current medications and significantly slow the progression of dementia, researchers say. Alzheimer’s disease, affects an estimated 350,000 people in Britain and more than 26 million people worldwide.
The team at the University of Aberdeen (UK), working with TauRx Therapeutics - a Singapore-based company spun out of the University - developed a novel treatment based on an entirely new approach which targets the tangles, aggregates of abnormal fibres of tau protein forming inside nerve cells in the brain. These aggregates first destroy nerve cells critical for memory and then destroy neurons in other parts of the brain as the disease progresses.
They used Rember(TM) which, slows progression of the disease by up to 81 per cent. Sufferers taking the drug three times a day for 50 weeks showed a slower decline in blood flow to the parts of the memory that are vital to the memory. Rember(TM) is methylene blue which disrupts aggregation of tau protein.