As National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month draws to a close, Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Institute for Dementia Research and Prevention continues working on its LABrainS project, which dedicated to dementia research for the approximately 5 million affected Americans.
Since its establishment in 2008, LABrainS aimed to detect early signs of cognitive decline associated with the onset of dementia by administering objective assessments of memory performance annually.
The study is open to anyone over the age of 60 who has not been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or any other type of dementia. Rob Brouillette, manager of the Institute for Dementia Research and Prevention, said the longitudinal study allows researchers to assess risk factors and create therapeutic strategies to prevent those risks.
According to Pennington’s website, LABrainS enrolled more than 2,000 participants statewide from 37 different parishes.
Brouillette said the study, along with the separate Josephine Lamar Dementia Study, enables the researchers to recruit pharmaceutical trials for the disease.
About eight percent of participants show early symptoms of dementia annually, Brouillette said — higher than the national rate.
“We have a higher incidence of risk factors [in Louisiana] — diabetes, high cholesterol,” Brouillette said.
He said IDRP hopes to develop better early detection techniques to identify people earlier for clinical trials. The future of research, Brouillette said, will involve pharmaceutical interventions for people who do not have symptoms but are at risk for developing them.
“We’re in an age where the population of the U.S. is aging a growing geriatric population,” Brouillette said. “We need to hone in on viable solutions for this disease because it’s become an ever-growing problem.”
The issue is one J. Steven Alexander, physiology professor at the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, called a “huge pressing problem looming on the horizon.”
Though not associated with LABrainS, Alexander specializes in Alzheimer’s drug development, working with the Boston-area based Aphios Corporation. He participated in LSU’s Alzheimer’s awareness efforts at the beginning of the month, engaging in community outreach.
He said his team wants to eliminate controllable risk factors by reducing blood sugar and stabilizing blood pressure. For the uncontrollable factors, Alexander said his drug will stop Alzheimer’s from becoming a common part of the aging process.
“There’s an absolute tsunami of a health care crisis coming in the form of Alzheimer’s,” Alexander said.
While LABrainS detects early signs of the disease, Alexander’s research seeks to develop drugs to prevent the progression of soldiers’ traumatic brain injuries into Alzheimer’s. Alexander said the disease is a high risk for military personnel.
He said his team patented Bryostatin, an oral drug that restores memory performance in mice with Alzheimer’s disease. The drug’s primary compound is a small molecule amyloid-reducing therapy, originally slated as a cancer drug but discovered more promising for cognitive processing research found in sea moss off the coast of southern California.
Alexander said he hopes to make the drug easily accessible, affordable and administerable. In the next 20 to 30 years, he said there could be 30-40 million people with Alzheimer’s — an “unimaginable” thought if people do not act on it soon.
“It’s everybody’s problem,” Alexander said. “Everyone you know, if they live long enough, is going to be at a greater risk for it.”