Dementia patients may soon be able to regain their memory without surgery, thanks to a breakthrough in treating the disease.
Scientists have developed a new technique that could potentially significantly improve the memory of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and it could be available in healthcare within five years at best, its developers say.
An initial study using this technique for just 30 minutes in people without Alzheimer’s found that memory accuracy—in this case, the ability to assign a name to a face—improved by an average of 10 to 20 percent.
Researchers hope that the situation can be significantly improved by treating sick people for longer periods.
Memory improvements come after scientists first found a way to perform deep brain stimulation (DBS) without surgery.
DBS is usually so invasive that it is not used in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, although it is considered an effective treatment.
The new technique paves the way for the use of DBS alone in combination with other promising new treatments currently in development that address the brain plaques that contribute to the disease.
It has already been shown to work in mice and is now shown to work in humans as well.
Called temporal interference (TI), it works by safely delivering electrical fields of varying frequencies through electrodes placed on the scalp and in different parts of the scalp.
Overlapping electrical fields allow a deep region of the brain called the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, to be affected through electrical stimulation without affecting surrounding areas.
Electrical stimulation produces oscillations, and these oscillations help encode information by synchronizing the activity of neurons that form memories and connecting them together.
This is the first time that an alternative to brain surgery has helped with DBS.
“This is a very, very important and very exciting step,” the doctor said. Nir Grossman from the Department of Brain Sciences, Imperial College London, I.
“With our new technology, we have shown for the first time that it is possible to remotely stimulate specific areas deep in the human brain without the need for surgery.
“This opens up an entirely new treatment option for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease that affect deep brain structures. We hope this will help increase the availability of deep brain stimulation techniques by significantly reducing costs and risks.”
He warned that larger trials are needed to confirm the technology’s potential.
Dr. Grossman will begin a follow-up study early next year with about 40 patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. He hopes to organize the next larger event with hundreds of participants; Based on the results, he would like to make a case for offering treatment in the health system.
Asked how long it might take at best for the technology to be proven and made available in this way, he said: “Five years would be a reasonable period for us if we act as quickly as possible.”
He warned that if there were problems with further testing, it could take much longer and might not happen at all.
Dr Richard Oakley, deputy director of research and innovation at the Alzheimer’s Society, who was not involved in the study, said: “This is incredible technology. Current treatments for Parkinson’s disease involve stimulating areas deep in the brain. However, these are invasive surgeries and recovery can take months.
“This study shows that it is possible to perform deep brain stimulation simply by wearing a headset. In addition, this stimulation may improve performance on memory tasks in healthy individuals.”
Dr Joanna Latimer, Head of Neurobiology and Mental Health at the Medical Research Council (MRC), added: “Results from the next phase of this promising treatment cannot come soon enough.”
“Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating disease for which effective treatments are urgently needed. Memory impairment is a key feature of the disease, and these initial results provide an innovative treatment option for people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.”
In a just-published study of the first experiments with this technique, researchers used post-mortem brain measurements for the first time to confirm that TI electric fields can be remotely focused in the hippocampus.
They then applied TI stimulation to healthy volunteers while they learned faces and names, a process that relies heavily on the hippocampus.
Using an imaging technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they showed that TI stimulation selectively affected hippocampal activity evoked by a memory task.
Finally, the researchers repeated the process over a longer period of 30 minutes to show that stimulation led to improved memory accuracy.
The study was published in the journal Natural neuroscience.
Source: I News
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