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Alzheimer's

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How Brain Imaging Could Help Predict Alzheimer's. Developing drugs that effectively slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease has been notoriously difficult.

How Brain Imaging Could Help Predict Alzheimer's

Scientists and drug developers believe that a large part of the problem is that they are testing these drugs too late in the progression of the disease, when significant damage to the brain makes intervention much more difficult. “Drugs like Lilly’s gamma secretase inhibitor failed because they were tested in the wrong group of patients,” says Sangram Sisodia, director of the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago.

Could hypertension drugs help people with Alzheimer’s? Antiviral drugs may slow Alzheimer’s progression. Antiviral drugs used to target the herpes virus could be effective at slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a new study shows.

Antiviral drugs may slow Alzheimer’s progression

The University of Manchester scientists have previously shown that the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV1) is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s when it is present in the brains of people who have a specific genetic risk to the disease. AD is an incurable neurodegenerative condition affecting about 18 million people worldwide. The causes of the disease or of the abnormal protein structures seen in AD brains – amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles – are completely unknown. The Manchester team has established that the herpes virus causes accumulation of two key AD proteins – β-amyloid (Aβ) and abnormally phosphorylated tau (P-tau) – known to be the main components of plaques and tangles respectively.

Both proteins are thought by many scientists to be involved in the development of the disease.