Alzheimer’s News: Plaque Burden, Financial Toll and Innovations

• A new study that brings back the controversy discussions?

New study published in Nature Neuroscience this week found that changing certain cellular interactions helps clear out?beta-amyloid plaques?from the brain, which are considered to be a sign of Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York focused on the a membrane receptor plexin-B1 and concluded that removing plexin-B1 can lead to better amyloid clearance and smaller plaque burden. This discovery could lay foundations for novel therapies.

However, there are 2 things to keep in mind:?

• the research is at a very early stage: the study was done in a genetic mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease
• the scientific approach of focusing on removing amyloid plaque buildup in order to reverse Alzheimer’s has experienced some controversy.

The controversy goes back to 2006 (or maybe even all the way to 1906 when the disease was described, if we want to delve deep into the history).?The 2006 paper,?published in the?Nature, identified a subtype of amyloid called Aβ*56 as a cause of Alzheimer’s. That paper has been cited nearly 2,300 times.?

However, in 2022 a 6-month by Charles Piller, a reporter for?Science?magazine, found that key research published in 2006 may have included fabricated data, in particular, manipulated images. If you are interested in the full story, you can find it here. What has been concluded by some of the publications that this story triggered is that the industry might have achieved better results in the last decade by allocating resources to a bigger variety of therapeutic approaches.

In addition, it’s also acknowledged that in clinical practice there are patients with high brain-amyloid burden without any cognitive complaints, as well as those with low brain-amyloid burden and disabling and severe cognitive complaints - which suggests a need for other research avenues.

Another recent study from Nature, for example, links the disease to lipids instead of proteins, mentioning that “Alois Alzheimer himself, who first described the condition, noted lipid bodies in glia in his patients’ brains over 100 years ago, but this has received little attention”.

• A new study on Alzheimer’s financial toll (that should be added to the startup decks to show the economic impact of the disease)?

A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University studied the effect of Alzheimer’s on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations.?

Apparently, credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is diagnosed: a year before diagnosis, people were 17% more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments, and 34.3 % on their credit card bills. The effect was traced to 5 years before the diagnosis.

This clearly demonstrates a need for an innovative solution on the verge of digital health and fintech to help prevent risky financial behaviour in people at risk of Alzheimer’s.

• If you are interested in innovation landscape in the area of Alzheimer’s, check these 14 companies that Startup Health selected to join Alzheimer’s Moonshot Community. It’s a good collection which gives an overview of what’s going on in the industry, from digital platform of early detection to blood test, eye movement diagnostics or landline-based therapy.

Related posts: A news study on the genetic risk of Alzheimer’s?