Researchers find new method for determining potential for Alzheimer's disease

 

[caption id="attachment_4337" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Senior citizen club"][/caption]

Carol Forsloff - With the growing number of Alzheimer's patients in the world, researchers are looking at ways of early identification and early treatment, with a new research study that shows promise for doing that.

What the University of California at Davis has found is that abnormal brain images combined with examination of the composition of the fluid that surrounds the spine present early signs of identifying older adults with seeming good health overall who are at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease well before memory and cognitive problems become obvious.

"Our findings indicate that a distinctive pattern of imaging and biomarker deviations from typical adults may be an early warning sign of neurobiological pathology and an early sign of Alzheimer's disease," said Laurel Beckett, a professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and the lead study author. "By the time people get diagnosed with Alzheimer's using cognitive tests, there's already a lot of brain damage. We hope that in the future methods that combine brain imaging and biomarker assessments can push the diagnosis back, while learning more about the mechanisms causing Alzheimer's disease, so we can develop better treatments."

For the study,  researchers utilized data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, that includes brain scans, clinical data and other laboratory results from spinal fluid and blood tests from more than 800 older adults. Some study participants presented with an apparent good cognitive health, others with mild cognitive impairment, a condition that often precedes Alzheimer's, and others with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers analyzed data from 220 normal older adults who had undergone structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and clinical examinations. About half also provided spinal fluid samples. Among the 96 participants, cluster analysis identified three distinct subgroups of individuals based solely on their baseline imaging and laboratory measures.

 During the next three years, few of these healthy people showed any cognitive change. But cognitive tests for people in one of the subgroups — about 10 percent of the sample — declined at nearly five times the rate as healthy older adults. The researchers believe this group with the most extreme MRI and spinal fluid measurements, may represent the earliest stages of subclinical cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease.

Beckett and his fellow researchers indicate that this type of imaging and fluid biomarkers can be helpful in assessing who is at risk for Alzheimers and cognitive decline and also can serve as a means of determining whether new treatments are able to slow the rate of decline and are effective.said that the finding is an important step toward discovering the constellation of imaging and fluid biomarkers that foreshadow cognitive decline, as well as a means of determining whether new treatments are effective.

"The problem with current clinical trials is that we don't know who is on the edge of experiencing dementia. And even if we did, how would we know if a treatment was working, since they haven't shown any clinical problems?" Beckett said. "This method could improve clinical trials for prevention and reduce the numbers of study participants necessary to speed drug discovery — and eventually change how the pharmaceutical industry and National Institutes of Health conduct Alzheimer's disease clinical trials."

 

 

 

 

 

New research suggests capable working memory of schizophrenics

 

[caption id="attachment_11074" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="schizophrenic"][/caption]

Carol Forsloff - Research on schizophrenics indicateS their working memories may on average be just as good as those without schizophrenia, and raises the question if this is true of schizophrenia would it also be true of autistic children given associations found between both disorders.  

Schizophrenia and autism in 2009 looked at the issue of both of these disorders as having common origins.  Hypotheses about both are tested on an ongoing basis, as the driving need is to determine what actually causes both autism and schizophrenia so that prevention efforts can be undertaken along with finding new ways of managing and caring for people with these conditions. 

Years ago autism was referred to as childhood schizophrenia. That’s because the children seemed to live in their own worlds, develop their own speech, retreat from what folks said was normal reality, and sometimes couldn’t speak at all. 

During the 1960’s, when students were educated to work with autistic children, the literature in the field stressed that autistic children were the result of a profile of a cold, distant, educated mother, someone who didn’t bond appropriately with the child. This was during the same years, that people who had schizophrenia were thought to have language and thought disorders from some base related to family patterns and parenting. 

The link between autism and schizophrenia then was narrated as of a different kind than the one discussed in present literature and in the psychoanalytic category of study and treatment.

A Dutch researcher by the name of Annemie Ploeger reviewed the extensive literature on autism and schizophrenia and demonstrated during her study that both schizophrenia and autism have certain common threads. She found, for example, that both diseases have a pattern of physical abnormalities that often occur during the first month of pregnancy. The toes of both schizophrenics and autistics are unique. But there are differences as well including the fact that autistics often have large heads and intestinal problems. Ploeger concludes that in the pregnancy disorders develop into autism in one person and schizophrenia in another. 

Vulnerability to autism or schizophrenia occurs, according to the present research, during the early days following the fertilization of the egg when the embryo is particularly fragile. If something goes wrong during that period it can influence the development.

Ploeger's research reveals that in the period between 20 and 40 days after fertilization, the embryo is highly susceptible to disruptions. In this period, early organogenesis, there is a lot of interaction between the different parts of the body. If something goes wrong with a given part of the body, it greatly influences the development of other parts of the body. Ploeger concluded that the foundation for these psychiatric disorders is laid very early during pregnancy. She also underlines the importance of women who are pregnant avoid certain behaviors during the early period to include smoking, use of certain drugs and stressful activities.

Another study of mental illnesses among parents again shows a link between autism and schizophrenia. It found that parental psychiatric disorders have been associated with autism in their offspring. The study is detailed in the May Journal of Pediatrics. In Sweden children who were diagnosed with autism before the age of 10 were matched with a control population. Then the parents of both groups of children were examined. The research concludes that for both parents schizophrenia is associated with autism. 

This recent study hearkens back to the early research by Bruno Bettelheim and his analyses of both the conditions of autism and schizophrenia and his determination about cold, distant mothers. His was a psychoanalytic analysis and conclusion that resulted in therapy for the mothers to help them with parenting as well as the training and education of the child.

Bettelheim’s research was very controversial in that, according to some, it created guilt and blame on the mother and blamed parenting, which created a barrier for real treatment of the child. This created discussion among professionals at the time of his research and continues to be with the present research.

Researchers of both autism and schizophrenia maintain ongoing research to be valuable that finds areas where there is normalcy, such as working memory function, bringing hope to areas that would otherwise appear bleak and final.