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Alzheimer’s disease has been a greatly debated and researched issue in the past few years. And for good reason. What’s worse than not being able to remember who you know, who you don’t, where you left your wallet or where you spent last Christmas? Not being able to rely on your own brain for information and logic.
The medical community is constantly studying how Alzheimer’s infects the brain, trying to determine how to invent better treatments and warning tests. It’s during one of these studies that researchers have recently discovered that long before Alzheimer’s disease starts to manifest any symptoms, certain bio-markers in the brain might still be able to warn about the future development of the disease.
The presence of these bio-markers make it easier for doctors to catch the disease sooner rather than later, and the new working theory is that they might even be visible when an individual is in their 20s or 30s, even though Alzheimer’s disease that starts manifesting late in a patient’s life.
The new study was concluded earlier this month, on July 6, 2015, by researchers at the School of Medicine from Washington University. The experts looked at the evolution of no less than 169 healthy subjects throughout more than a decade. They were periodically tested, ant the bio-markers in their cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) was analyzed once every three (3) years.
What the research team found is that there’s a chance some people could be diagnosed with the potential of developing Alzheimer’s disease later in their life, simply by looking at the changes that their bio-markers undergo thought their life.
Anne Fagan, senior author on the study and professor of neurology at Washington University’s School of Medicine, gave a statement saying that the research is in a much too primitive stage for it to become the norm for predicting the chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease, however she added that she and her colleagues are actively working towards this goal and that she hopes to see the method employed some day.
Current statistics reveal that Alzheimer’s disease is responsible for somewhere between 60 percent (60%) and 70 percent (70%) of all documented cases of dementia. Once diagnosed with the neurodegenerative illness, a patient is only expected to live for another three (3) to nine (9) years.
Image Source: americannursetoday.com
