His SILK test quickly reveals whether medication is working to limit the harmful protein amyloid beta
By January W. Payne
Neuroscientist David Holtzman was captivated by Alzheimer's disease as a medical student. Now the 47-year-old associate director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Holtzman says he realized that Alzheimer's "was going to be one of the biggest problems that we would face, and it was unsolved." Figuring out how the illness begins and how to prevent or slow it has been his goal ever since.
Holtzman's persistence is paying off. Until now, it typically took about two years to determine whether a new Alzheimer's drug was having an effect. But recently, he and colleagues devised a test that rapidly shows whether an experimental medication has a chance of working. "There aren't good ways without doing a long, expensive trial" to determine this, he says. But with the new test, called stable isotope-linked kinetics, or SILK, "we were able to come up with a technique to figure out over a day or two whether a drug is hitting its target in the brain," he says.
SILK reveals whether the.......read all of Attacking Alzheimer's With a New Test for Amyloid Beta
Here is a great dementia resource for caregivers and healthcare professinals,
Here is information on being the best caregiver you can be
Here are more interesting dementia articles and activities,
No comments:
Post a Comment