BOB DOUGHTY: Patients cannot fully recover from Alzheimer's. But many can be helped by medicine. That is especially true if the disease is found early.
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Alzheimer's affects people of all races equally. Yet women are more likely to develop the disease than men. This is partly because women generally live longer than men.
BOB DOUGHTY: And I'm Bob Doughty. Join us again next week for another SCIENCE IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
BOB DOUGHTY: The British writer Iris Murdoch died of Alzheimer's disease. She said it was a dark and terrible place. In nineteen six, a German doctor, Alois Alzheimer, told about a dementia patient whose brain was studied after death. Her brain had sticky structures and nerve cells that appeared to be mixed together. Now, more than one hundred years later, scientists are still trying to find the causes and treatment of Alzheimer's disease.
The best way to diagnose the disease has been a medical examination of the brain after a person dies. Doctors say methods to test the living have presented problems, like high costs for widespread use.
BOB DOUGHTY: The Food and Drug Administration will decide next month whether to accept the panel's suggestions. The FDA normally follows the advice of its expert advisers, but not always.
The Alzheimer's Association says FDA-approved drugs are effective for half the people who take them. For those fifty percent, the drugs are effective for six to twelve months.
By Jerilyn Watson
2011-2-7
Photo: AP
A patient with dementia, right, works on a puzzle with caregivers at the Morning Glory Retirement Home in State Line, Pennsylvania
The United States' Food and Drug Administration is considering one such method. The method combines an examination by positron emission tomography with a drug that lights up beta-amyloid. The PET device makes scans or images that doctors can read.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Scientists have been attempting for years to learn who may get Alzheimer's disease. If the condition could be identified before its worst signs appear, people might get at least temporary medical help. There is no cure for Alzheimer's, which steals people's ability to care for themselves. But treatment can slow its progress.
Alzheimer's is identified in only about two percent of people who are sixty-five. But the risk increases to about twenty percent by age eighty. By eighty-five or ninety, half of all people are found to have some signs of the disease.
Alzheimer's affects memory and personality -- those qualities that make a person an individual. At first, people with the condition forget simple things, like where they left the keys to their car. But as time passes, they forget more and more. They may forget what a key is used for.
BOB DOUGHTY: Victims can become angry and violent as the ability to think and remember decreases. They sometimes shout and move with no purpose or goal. Or they may become very quiet.
Probably the most common early sign is short-term memory loss. The victim cannot remember something that happened yesterday, for example. Also, victims of the disease have increasing difficulty learning and storing new information. Slowly, thinking becomes much more difficult. The victims cannot understand a joke, or cannot cook a meal, or perform simple work.
BOB DOUGHTY: And I'm Bob Doughty. Today we tell about Alzheimer's disease. More than a century after its discovery, Alzheimer's disease is still destroying people's brains. But research may offer hope for the future.
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BOB DOUGHTY: Public and medical demand for a better way has been strong. Scientists have been working to produce a dependable test for the disease in the living.
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If it is approved, florbetapir would be the first agent permitted to measure plaque deposits in living patients. Still, the presence of plaques does not prove that a patient has Alzheimer's disease. Doctors say some people with amyloid plaques in their brains do not have the condition.
FAITH LAPIDUS: Alzheimer's disease normally affects people more than sixty-five years old. But rare cases have been discovered in people younger than fifty.
FAITH LAPIDUS: This was written by Jerilyn Watson. I'm Faith Lapidus.
FAITH LAPIDUS: An estimated thirty million people around the world have Alzheimer's disease. In the United States alone, more than five million people suffer from this presently incurable brain disorder.
The FDA has approved two kinds of drugs for Alzheimer's. Most are called cholinesterase inhibitors. A doctor must order these medicines for patients. Cholinesterase inhibitors may work by protecting a chemical messenger needed for brain activities. They are meant to treat memory, thinking, language, judgment and other brain activity. Doctors order them for mild to moderate cases of the disease.