MUST READS

A January 3, 2018 Being Patient article looked at treating Alzheimer’s disease with a diabetes drug which helps balance blood sugar and metabolism. People with diabetes have a 75 to 100 percent higher chance of developing AD. According to Doug Brown of the Alzheimer’s Society, “With no new treatments in nearly 15 years, we need to find new ways of tackling Alzheimer’s. It’s imperative that we explore whether drugs developed to treat other conditions can benefit people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. This approach to research could make it much quicker to get promising new drugs to the people who need them.”

A January 3, 2018 Des Moines Register opinion piece by Dick Goodson shared his personal experience having Alzheimer’s disease, which he says is not linear in progression. According to Goodson, “The transition from a doer to a nondoer is very hard and very frustrating because it has a down side. That is if another person (wife, paid professional, etc.) begins to take over doer responsibilities, it becomes critical to get the timing right. If the new doer does it too early in the process, the Alzheimer’s-afflicted person will feel that the power to run his/her own life is going away, and that is not good for them or for the folks around them. They will become resentful and irritated, and then the caregiver may back off all together.”

According to a January 2, 2018 Rolling Stone article, Karen Wilder, the widow of Gene Wilder, penned an essay about her husband’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease and her life as his caregiver. She writes, “It is a strange, sad irony that so often, in the territory of a disease that robs an individual of memory, caregivers are often the forgotten. Without them, those with Alzheimer’s could not get through the day, or die – as my husband did – with dignity, surrounded by love."

A December 28, 2017 Being Patient article interviewed Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital neurologist Rebecca Amariglio, PhD, about how self-reporting cognitive issues compares to memory tests. According to Amariglio, based on observations from the Harvard Aging Brain Study, “Some of our initial findings showed that the greater number of complaints about memory on a subjective questionnaire—like forgetfulness, misplacing things, repeating themselves, getting disoriented—was associated with amyloid burden on a PET scan. Again, these are people who are clinically normal, so they do perfectly well on cognitive testing. We then found that people who had both amyloid burden and nerve degeneration had even more complaints—the idea being that these people are maybe even further along in the trajectory toward Alzheimer’s disease prior to impairment, but with biomarker changes.”

RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A January 3, 2018 Medical Xpress article reported that researchers have identified several new genes responsible for Alzheimer's disease. According to Principal Study Investigator Lindsay A. Farrer, PhD of Boston University School of Medicine, "Our findings provide important insight about biological mechanisms leading to Alzheimer disease, especially at stages of the disease before symptoms occur. The novel genes we identified may be potential targets for developing new treatments that might delay or even prevent onset of symptoms of this insidious disease."

EVENTS AND RESOURCES

The FDA Grand Rounds is webcast every other month to highlight cutting-edge research underway across the Agency and its impact on protecting and advancing public health. Join-in on Thursday, January 11, 2018 from 12-1:00pm. Each session features an FDA scientist presenting on a key public health challenge and how FDA is applying science to its regulatory activities. The 45-minute presentation is followed by questions from the audience. #FDAGrandRounds.