Looking Alzheimer’s in the eye

There are currently believed to be some 35 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s all over the world. It’s a staggering figure that experts say could double or even triple by the year 2050. Diagnosis is a traumatic time for both victims and their families, because there is quite simply now cure. But a team of scientists in Munich are working towards changing that.

There are currently believed to be some 35 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s all over the world. It’s a staggering figure which in light of our ageing societies is set to rise exponentially over the coming decades. Experts say the figure could double or even triple by the year 2050. Diagnosis is a traumatic time for both victims and their families, because there is quite simply now cure. But a team of scientists in Munich are working towards changing that.

Alzheimer’s sufferers become such when their beta-amyloid and tau proteins clump together both inside and outside the nerve cells. Exactly why it happens is unclear, but what is certain is that when agglutination occurs, it damages essential cell functions and hinders communication between nerve cells.

Consequently, brain cells start to die and the brain shrinks by up to 20 percent, depending on the ferocity of the illness. Patients lose their memories and their whole personas change, they lose their sense of time and space and can no longer deal with day-to-day existence. In its latter stages, the illness strips its victims of their personalities, and puts them in need of round-the-clock care.

Diagnostic issues

One of the principle problems has always been diagnosis. The brain is good at compensating for forgetfulness and confusion – the typical signs of dementia – and can keep up the act for as long as two decades. By the time the extent of the problem is revealed through endless tests, expensive magnetic resonance tomographs and nuclear medicine procedures, as many as a third of brain cells can have been destroyed. And that is too many to reverse the damage done.

Munich-based neuropathologist Jochen Herms and his team of 20 researchers are working towards a more simple means of diagnosis, which would consist of nothing more than looking in the patient’s eye.

Herms’ theory is that the retinas of Alzheimer’s sufferers display abnormalities which can be traced back to the relevant brain processes, long long before the typical symptoms of Alzheimer begin to raise their ugly heads. From that point onwards, the disease could be treated before irreversible damage occurs.

The scientist is currently working on describing and proving the connection between the retina changes and the brain. His research requires him to experiment on brain and retina samples from deceased Alzheimer’s patients and on genetically-altered Alzheimer’s mice.

Complementary research

Simultaneously, researchers at the Clemens-Schoepft Insitute of the Technical University in the German city of Darmstadt are searching for sensor pigments which make it possible to detect abnormalities in the retina.

A study at the eye clinic at the University of Jena is looking at the changes in the retinas of patients at an advanced stage of the disease, and specialists at optics manufacturers Carl-Zeiss Jena are developing the necessary retina laser scan machines.

The three year, three million euro ($3.94 million) project, which is largely financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is due to run until the end of 2011, and could help to spare millions of people the fate of dementia.

Reporter: Lydia Heller (tkw)
Editor: Cyrus Farivar