August 01, 2014

Today's Top Alzheimer's News

The FDA announces it will start regulating medical-laboratory testing, more coverage on 'Alive Inside', and five reasons to be optimistic about Alzheimer's research (read more). 
 

Must reads

  • An August 1, 2014 Bloomberg article reported that "The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said Thursday it would start regulating medical-laboratory testing, saying that tests used to make important medical decisions must be vetted and validated before they go into use." According to the article, "According to Jeffrey Shuren, director of the agency’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health,“Today, many LDTs are more complex, have a nationwide reach and have higher-risk uses such as detection of risk for breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease...Without appropriate safeguards, neither patients nor their health care providers can be assured that these tests are safe and effective.” Also reported on by the Associated Press
  • An August 1, 2014 Reuters article reported on the documentary 'Alive Inside' and the use of music therapy in Alzheimer's care. According to the article, "The documentary chronicles New York social worker Dan Cohen's effort to bring such therapy to dementia patients as a way to lessen the use of medication and combat its cost on a strained healthcare system about to absorb aging Baby Boomers. Cohen, the 62-year-old founder of Music & Memory, a program that seeks to make musical therapy a standard part of nursing home care, began using the treatment in 2006."
  • An August 31, 2014 Huffington Post article by Dr. Howard Fillit highlighted five reasons to be optimistic about Alzheimer's research. Among the five reasons included advances in brain imaging tools, according to Dr. Fillit, "Many physicians are currently utilizing FDA-approved brain-imaging tests to detect amyloid plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, but these plaques can be present in individuals who never develop symptoms of the disease. New imaging agents target the tangles (clumps of tau) that are the tombstones of dying neurons and are likely to be a better surrogate for tracking Alzheimer's progression and determining the efficacy of any given drug. Researchers at the AAIC also noted that some of these imaging tools may work for related diseases that also have tangles, such as frontotemporal dementia, and could be used to assess tau pathology in the brain after a traumatic head injury." Dr. Howard Fillit is the founding executive director and chief science officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.