Spinal-Fluid Test Is Found to Predict Alzheimer’s

[Cold Highway]

Alzheimer’s, medical experts now agree, starts a decade or more before people have symptoms. And by the time there are symptoms, it may be too late to save the brain. So the hope is to find good ways to identify people who are getting the disease, and use those people as subjects in studies to see how long it takes for symptoms to occur and in studies of drugs that may slow or stop the disease.

Researchers are finding simple and accurate ways to detect Alzheimer’s long before there are definite symptoms. In addition to spinal fluid tests they also have new PET scans of the brain that show the telltale amyloid plaques that are a unique feature of the disease. And they are testing hundreds of new drugs that, they hope, might change the course of the relentless brain cell death that robs people of their memories and abilities to think and reason.

Rock On, the human body is an ever unfolding mystery.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/health/research/10spinal.html?hp

 

[Slartibartfast]

This is awesome.

I am losing a grandmother right now to this and while its probably too late for her, hopefully fewer or nobody in the future will suffer the same fate.