Alzheimer's Disease Treatment Updates: Babysitting Can Prevent Disease, Panacea Drug in Development?
While the world is still awaiting for an Alzheimer-disease panacea, recent studies reveal that babysitting grandchildren can help prevent the disease from taking over the lives of old people.
According to reports, a study in Australia has revealed that caring for grandkids can help old people avert Alzheimer's disease as it increases brain power and decreases the chances for them to develop depression. After all, Dr. Diana Kerwin, chief of geriatrics at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas and founder of Texas Alzheimer's and Memory Disorders, has said that interacting with other people, such as babysitting, is one of the best things that can help old people.
"If you think about when you do take care of a child, you tend to become more of a teacher. You're teaching them new experiences, maybe taking them to the zoo or working on vocabulary with them ... it's stimulating for the babysitter's brain as well," Kerwin explained.
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While babysitting may prevent Alzheimer's disease from taking over old people's lives, there is still no foolproof way to reverse the conditions of those who already have the disease. However, according to a report of 9News, it may just be a matter of time before a cure for the disease can be developed.
It has been learned that all of the 190 drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease have already failed in the clinical trial. However, according to reports, a team of doctors at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus are currently studying a drug that can pave the way for a new "class" of Alzheimer's medications that can effectively reverse the disease, Leukine.
According to Dr. Huntington Potter, the director of Alzheimer's research at CU Anschutz, an effective Alzheimer's drug must have the capacity to remove the plaque or amyloid that causes Alzheimer's from the outside of the nerve cells in the brain. As Leukine has effectively demonstrated that it has such a capacity when it was tested on laboratory mice, there is no denying that it is, indeed, promising.
"We found so far that Leukine is safe in people with Alzheimer's disease. That means that it doesn't have the side effects that so many other Alzheimer's drugs have had, which are swelling in the brain and bleeding into the brain," Potter said.
