Mice Cured of Alzheimer's Provide Hope for the Rest of Us
Rebecca West
Alzheimer's is one of those words, much like cancer, that strikes fear in our hearts. It's a terrifying diagnosis that forever alters our world. But that could — in the not-so-distant future — be changing as news spreads about a new Alzheimer's remedy that is being developed after initial trials seem to have cured the disease in mice.
The trials, conducted by a team of Israeli scientists throughout 2022, purportedly caused 30 mice suffering from the debilitating disease to regain full cognitive ability by utilizing synthetic molecules. While the path to developing a cure for human beings is a ways off, the trials are a welcome step in one day eradicating the illness.
Alzheimer's Disease
The investigation focused on a new approach to developing an Alzheimer's cure, which scientists at Ben-Gurion University saw as being highly effective for the mice participating in the study.
While existing treatments manage and to some extent mitigate the scope of Alzheimer's within the brains of its sufferers, Professor Varda Shoshan-Barmatz and her colleagues commenced trials that looked at plaque build-up within the brain itself.
The plaque is frequently associated with the inability to rinse or cleanse the brain during sleep, which is why so many physicians involved in sleep studies are concerned about their patients. Insomnia is a huge problem in this country, and lack of sleep doesn't allow the cleansing process to take place as it should.
Alzheimer's Research
Rather interestingly, the molecule the team developed during the study didn't do much to actually mitigate the plaque from the brains of the test group, but it did, nevertheless, provide incredibly positive outcomes by reportedly curing all 30 of the rodents taking part in the trial.
Alzheimer's is a progressive mitochondrial dysfunction of the brain associated with dysregulated metabolism, brain inflammation, synaptic loss, and neuronal cell death. It impacts as many as 3 million new patients in the U.S. every year causing memory loss, confusion, and disorientation — and those numbers are just in the U.S.!
The work Shoshan-Barmatz and her team have completed will hopefully bring us one step closer to achieving an effective cure for all sooner rather than later.
Cure for Alzheimer's
The results of the trials were reported in the scientific journal Biomedcentral.
Back in 2022, the Israeli team also created a startup company called Tamarix Pharma to take the next crucial step in eradicating the disease in human beings as quickly as possible. For more information on the study and exactly what they did and found, interested readers can click on the journal link above.
