Alzheimer’s: A Ray of Hope? Just Perhaps Maybe

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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2012/07/18/alzheimers-a-ray-of-hope-just-perhaps-maybe/



The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has always looked for an anomaly in the persistent cosmic background chatter—a change perhaps in the intensity of a signal that can be taken as a sign that a transmission might be a message to us earthlings from other intelligent beings.

Each year, medical researchers who gather at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference search for something similar as they weigh reports of the complex biology of the human brain for some sign that a drug might actually change the relentless course of the disease. Unlike many other major diseases that afflict millions of people, Alzheimer’s lacks a medicine that can send a patient into remission or maybe even effect a cure.

On Tuesday, in Vancouver, the pharmaceutical company Baxter International reported to conference attendees on a weak but enticing signal, a drug that, if it works in larger clinical trials now under way, might actually stabilize patients and stop disease progression. Gammagard, or intravenous immunoglobulin, a soup of antibodies extracted from blood donors and already approved for some immune disorders, stopped for three years any decline in cognition and ability to go about the chores of daily living for four patients who received the highest dose.

Four patients? True, it may be nothing. Too few patients, for sure, to make any predictions about whether, as so often in the past, the drug may falter and go by the wayside as it makes its way through the clinical trials pipeline . But the results still intrigued some in the research community who are normally circumspect about early reports. ‘‘It’s tantalizing. If you were to pick out four people with Alzheimer’s disease, the likelihood that they would perform the same on standardized tests three years later is very, very tiny,’’ William Thies, the scientific director for the Alzheimer’s Association, told the Associated Press.