New Obesity Treatment Offers Hope For Alzheimer’s Patients
By MedHeadlines • Feb 4th, 2008 • Category: Alzheimer's Disease, Editor's Picks, Elderly Care, Memory, ObesityA new treatment being used to treat obesity may also be helpful in stimulating memory in Alzheimer’s patients. The discovery was made when doctors pushed electrodes deep into a man’s brain during surgery in an effort to control his appetite. Once the electrodes were stimulated with an electric current, vivid memories were unlocked of an experience that occurred 30 years earlier.
Following surgery, the patient recovered for two months. When the electrodes were fitted a second time, more tests showed that his ability to learn was dramatically improved when the current was switched on and his brain stimulated.
“We knew immediately that this was important,” noted lead researcher Professor Andres Lozano of Toronto Western Hospital. “We are sufficiently intrigued to see if this could help people with memory disorders. We know very little about the circuitry of the memory. This could give us some insight.” The findings were reported in the most recent issue of the Annals of Neurology, which is the journal of the American Neurological Association.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia, which is the loss of intellectual and social abilities severe enough to interfere with daily functioning. Dementia occurs in people with Alzheimer’s disease because healthy brain tissue degenerates, causing a steady decline in memory and mental abilities. About 5 million older Americans have Alzheimer’s, a disease that usually develops in people age 65 or older. This number is expected to triple by the year 2050 as the population ages.
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