Alzheimer testing may need to be more comprehensive according to new research. Analysts from the United States and the U.K. after conducting related observations on animals found that patients may benefit from earlier examinations primarily on long-term memory loss, which is not part of clinical tests.
Recognizing Alzheimer’s at an early stage is “widely recognized as a crucial step in the development of effective treatments for the disease,” the researchers say. The report was published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications. They note, however, that the signs of the disease are usually “extremely difficult to observe,” CNBC reports.
Study co-author Richard Morris, of the University of Edinburgh said that the bulk of current research has focused only on severe symptoms that surface later in Alzheimer’s development. But Morris also voices there’s a shortfall with this approach.
“As things developed in the last few years,” Morris told CNBC, “there is a growing sense that by the time Alzheimer’s is fully diagnosed, and plaques are formed in the brains of humans, it is almost too late to do anything. So instead of looking for these great big effects that reproduce the later stages of the syndrome, which was an important first step academically, maybe what we ought to be doing is looking for the needle in the haystack.”
Morris and his colleagues said they want to initiate further dialog about the feasibility of early-stage tests, and whether they may assist in more effective Alzheimer’s drugs.
“If I could put it in its bluntest form, do you wait until Granny or Grandpa have full-blown Alzheimer’s disease and then as a family sit around and say, ‘What should we should do?’ Or from the point of view of trying to think about new drugs, should we actually be looking at the very earliest stages, before there is massive pathology? Perhaps drugs would work much better there, if the brain was in that state than in the more advanced state of pathology.”
As such, Morris and his colleagues took healthy mice against a variable of mice in the initial stages of an Alzheimer’s-like condition and trained them to navigate their way to a hidden pool of water, incorporating a series of signs and markers.
They then tested both mouse classifications a week later and recorded two distinct differences. First, the Alzheimer’s group did markedly worse on the test. During the course, they were mostly incapable of remembering the water dish’s location. Secondly, scientists noticed a significant drop in glucose levels, a key measure of how much energy their brains were using.
“Our animals not only can’t behaviorally remember what is happening, they are showing a metabolic deficit in the brain, at the same time,” he said.
But Morris urged awareness in drawing conclusions about human health based on animal testing. He also pointed out that some researchers are skeptical of “behavioral” data investigators registered in its study, as opposed to biochemical tests. But, he said, behavioral data is “very important because they relate directly to the human situation.”