Amazing Alzheimer’s News For 10 Million Baby Boomers Destined For Plague

A staggering ten million American baby boomers will suffer from Alzheimer’s with little to no early warning and horrendous implications for loved ones as well as the patient. This might have changed, according to new research showing scientists might have found an early-warning sign to identify what is called “the defining disease of baby boomers.”

Breakthrough for ‘Generation Alzheimer’s‘

Two separate new studies identified a “biomarker” of the disease in an eye test, as reported by the Independent on Sunday.

Incidence and prevalence of Alzheimer’s and other dementias are projected to surge, according to the Alzheimer’s Association report 2013 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures. Diagnosing Alzheimer’s, however, has remained time consuming, frustrating, hit and miss medical guess work as well as experimenting with prescription drugs.

“The toll on caregivers – usually family members – is also devastating,” says Association of Health Care Journalists Liz Seegert.

Now, an indicator for the degenerative disorder and the most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s, has been identified in the eye’s retina and lens, according to scientists’ pilot studies.

Both methods were able to distinguish between probable Alzheimer’s patients and healthy volunteers with a high level of accuracy, the Independent reports.

Quick and Inexpensive

Dr Simon Ridley, head of science at the Alzheimer’s Research UK charity said, “It is difficult to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease accurately and, in many cases, by the time the symptoms have developed, damage has already been going on in the brain for a number of years.

“The development of a quick, cheap, non-invasive test to detect Alzheimer’s would be an important step in helping people receive an early diagnosis, and helping to improve clinical trials so that potential new treatments have the best chance of success.”

An eye test is envisioned as the first step to identifying possible cases of Alzheimer’s cases, according to the scientists. That would be followed by more expensive procedures to confirm the diagnosis, including PET – positron emission tomography – scans or spinal fluid analysis, they say.

As more baby boomers become seniors, all types of dementia, including Aleimer’s incidence are expected to rapidly increase. This risk doubles for every five years in age after age 65, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Twice as many people in the U.S.  have Alzheimer’s today as in 1980. This rate is expected to double by 2050 to an estimated 16 million adults.

Alzheimer’s is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. among all adults, fifth on the list for those over 65. According to the CDC, over 83,000 people in the U.S. died of Alzheimer’s last year – 27 per 100,000.

An Australian study used curcumin, turmeric spice ingredient, as a fluorescent marker that binds closely with beta-amyloid, allowing it to show up in the retina. The researchers asked volunteers to take supplements of curcumin, that was then detected in the eye using a novel imaging system. Preliminary results on 40 participants showed the test detected every participant with Alzheimer’s and correctly identified those shown in the brain by PET imaging.

In the other study, U.S. researchers from Cognoptix used an ointment to apply a flour escent label to beta-amyloid in the eye lens. Laser scanning was then able to detect the protein. In the U.S. tests of 40 volunteers with and without Alzheimer’s, it identified those having the disease with 85 per cent accuracy.

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