<h3> Alzheimer's disease </h3>

No end to dementia

Ten years ago people talked confidently of stopping Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks. Now, they realise they have no idea how to do that

Publicado en The Economist Junio 17, 2010

DRUG companies are notoriously secretive. The clock starts running on a patent when it is filed, so the longer something can be kept under wraps before that happens, the better for the bottom line. You know something is up, then, when a group of these firms announce they are banding together to share the results of abandoned drug trials. And on June 11th several big companies did just that. They publicised the profiles of 4,000 patients from 11 trials so that they could learn from each other’s failures. An act of selflessness, perhaps, but also one of desperation. Ver artículo completo...

A propósito del tema que veremos el próximo martes
-Grandes temas de la medicina del Siglo XXI-, la enfermedad
de Alzheimer ha sido desde el siglo pasado un reto para
los científicos. En el siglo actual lo sigue siendo.

Incluyo un comentario interesante sobre la nota publicada en The Economist:

The critically important part of this article is the recognition that the old clinical model of waiting for symptoms is utterly inappropriate for chronic ailments. For example, by the time Parkinson's Disease is evident, approximately 80% of the substantia nigra has already been damaged - and such damage is not reversible. Yet if PD is detected a decade or more prior to the classic symptoms appearing, it can be substantially inhibited by use of MAOB drugs. Unfortunately, few physicians know how to spot pre-symptomatic PD (the clues are the appearance of 3 seemingly unrelated symptoms: loss of smell sensitivity, constipation, and increasingly poor sleeping patterns).

So not only do scientists need to understand the mechanism(s) by means of which Alzheimer's Disease (and similar neurodegenerative ailments) operates but we also need early-warning indicators that permit treatment to occur well before significant neural damage has been sustained. This, in turn, will require a major re-think of the way in which physicians think, diagnose, and prescribe. In short, tackling neurodegenerative diseases will require a fundamental reworking of the way medicine is practiced in the 21st century .
CA-Oxonian's

Saludos, O. A.