Treatment For Alzheimer’s Should Start Years Before Disease Sets In

Treatment for Alzheimer’s probably needs to begin years or even decades before symptoms of the disease start to appear, scientists reported at this week’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans.

“By the time an Alzheimer’s patient is diagnosed even with mild or moderate Alzheimer’s there is very, very extensive neuron death,” said John Morrison of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. “And the neurons that die are precisely those neurons that allow you to navigate the world and make sense of the world.”

Once those neurons die, he says, critical brain circuits involved in thinking and memory are gone forever, Morrison said. “We need to move way back in time and intervene before there’s extensive neuron death.”