New Method Discovered for Early Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease
By: Joshua Daly | Posted: 13th December 2006
A CBS story shows that the 4.5 million people that suffer from Alzheimer's disease is expected to triple to more than 13 million by 2050. Although there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease, early detection is a very key element to successfully fight the disease and scientists found a new early detection method.
Dr. Norman Relkin of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York told CBS new, "Right now we have to wait until people have symptoms before they can diagnose the disease, Ideally, what we would like to be able to do is identify the disease before effectively it even starts."
Relkin told CBS that recently scientists have found that protein patterns found in spinal fluid may help early detection of Alzheimer's. This new method is 90 percent accurate and a drastic improvement over the only other current solution which is a brain autopsy. Scientists think that a build up of abnormal proteins around nerve cells is what causes Alzheimer's.
In the story, a 72 year old man using the new detection method discovered he had the debilitating disease, and was able to better treat it since they caught it at an early stage.
"We were able to catch Alzheimer's at the first signs and get him started on treatment, and we feel we have stabilized the disease a little bit better than we would have had we not caught it early," Dr. Murali Doraiswamy of the Duke Medical Center told CBS.
Hopefully these studies will lead to a better understanding of Alzheimer's disease and be able to push research forward in finding a cure.
This article was brought to you courtesy of epharmacies.com. For more related articles on health and the pharmaceutical industry, visit our blog: Insider Guide to Online Prescriptions.
This article is free for republishing
Printed From: http://www.a1articles.com/new-method-discovered-for-early-detection-of-alzheimers-disease-112019.html
Back to the original article
Tags: first signs, nerve cells, pharmaceutical industry, autopsy, articles on health, drastic improvement