Preventing Alzheimers
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the emotional health of the family. However, it’s difficult to do when no one is giving the caregiver assistance. Ala wants to find out what help caregivers need, and provide them with those services. With reduced stress, he says, caregivers could continue to keep Alzheimer’s patients in the home two to five years longer.
He has presented the study’s proposal to SIU’s review board, and hopes to start recruiting patient and caregiver pairs by the end of the year.
While there have been hundreds of pharmaceutical trials, none have yet to provide long-lasting or reliable relief from Alzhiemer’s. SIU is participating in several drug studies; the results of some may not be known for years, he says.
The problem with pharmaceutical treatment, Ala says, is it’s difficult to know who will have Alzheimer’s, so drug studies can only treat those already infected.
“There’s a difference between treating someone who has Alzheimer’s disease and trying to prevent Alzheimer’s,” he says. “By the time there’s symptoms, there’s already significant damage.”
Currently, funding for SIU’s Alzheimer’s research projects totals $3.5 million, from both public and private sources. The center is partially state-funded, and partners with Eastern Illinois University as well as SIU’s Carbondale campus.
Dr. Robert Struble, an associate professor and research director for the center, is studying the severity of Alzheimer’s in autopsied tissue. His research has found that Alzheimer’s patients who had visual impairments like cataracts may have a different pattern of lesions in the brain than those without visual impairment, meaning that brain activity can influence the pattern of Alzheimer’s disease lesions.
Struble is also using animal models to study Beta-amyloid, a protein considered a key player in the development and progression of Alzheimer’s. Struble observes mice with the amyloid protein in their system, to see if their behavior is different from those without the protein. His team tests the animal models for symptoms like forgetfulness, which is often the first sign of the disease.
Animal studies are very helpful, Struble says, because researchers can watch for early onset of the disease, something it’s nearly impossible to do with humans, because of the delay between the start of Alzheimer’s and the onset of symptoms.
“We can’t follow these developments in the human population,” he says. “But with animals, we have benchmarks we can follow. We know what the mice are supposed to be able to do by a certain age. We want to know if we can change the progression of the disease, if we can create an intervention.”
However, SIU will continue to study Alzheimer’s patients. Zec plas to develop research projects on the subject of behavioral change. His goal is to get people exercising more, participating in activities like racewalking. Even 30 minutes of physical activity three times per week offers some advance over being completely sedentary, he says.
“Getting people to exercise, lose weight, change dietary habit isn’t an easy thing,” Zec says. “It’s even difficult to get people to take their pills. We hope to talk about ways to develop new improved health habits and to extinguish bad habits.”
That’s why it’s so important to have a healthy lifestyle, Zec says. The sooner a person starts exercising and eating right, the better the odds. Though it can be challenging to make people understand the importance of forming healthy habits, the results are worthwhile, he says.
“The earlier in life you begin to modify these risk factors, the better your chances are that you can delay the disease,” he says. “It’s scary, but there’s hope.”
Contact Diane Ivey at [email protected].
