Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Despite Uneven Results, Alzheimer's Research Suggests A Path For Treatment | Redux

Despite Uneven Results, Alzheimer's Research Suggests A Path For Treatment

why is the sky blue?
why is the sky blue? by optick
License (according to Flickr): Attribution-ShareAlike License
Excerpt:

Brain scans using Amyvid dye to highlight beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. Clockwise from top left: a cognitively normal subject; an amyloid-positive patient with Alzheimer's disease; a patient with mild cognitive impairment who progressed to dementia during a study; and a patient with mild cognitive impairment. It's been a mixed year for Alzheimer's research. Some promising drugs failed to stop or even slow the disease. But researchers also found reasons to think that treatments can work if they just start sooner. Scientists who study Alzheimer's say they aren't discouraged by the drug failures. "I actually think it was a phenomenal year for research," says Bill Rebeck, a brain scientist at Georgetown University. Rebeck is optimistic because during the year, several very different lines of research all began to suggest a new way of thinking about Alzheimer's — that it has to be stopped before it damages the brain.

People:

Bill Rebeck

Overall Sentiment: -0.0343626

Relevance: 0.908736

SentimentQuote
0.1155"I actually think it was a phenomenal year for research," says Bill Rebeck, ...
-0.286869"Once you start to lose a lot of synapses, once you start to lose a lot of neurons, your brain can't recover from that," Rebeck says. ...
-0.235729"Once you start to lose a lot of synapses, once you start to lose a lot of neurons, your brain can't recover from that," Rebeck says. "And so when we start with people who have symptoms of the disease, treating them turns out to be unsuccessful."
0"In the PET scan you can see whether somebody has amyloid in their brain...before [they show] symptoms of the disease. I think that's huge," Rebeck says. ...
-0.0163582"What that says is there's an opportunity, there's a window when if we could stop that amyloid from accumulating, or start to clear it out of the brain, then you could prevent those symptoms from actually ever happening," he says. ...
0.0809545"It took a long time for us to make that connection between cholesterol and heart disease," says Rebeck.
0.26366"It took a long time for us to make that connection between cholesterol and heart disease," says Rebeck. "That's been very successful. It's been very helpful in so many people's lives. We're just [at] earlier stages in studying Alzheimer's disease."
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 7
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.0788417
  • Mean: -0.0112631
  • Standard Deviation: 1.7320508075689

Michael Raffi

Overall Sentiment: 0.0154238

Relevance: 0.259007

SentimentQuote
0.142735"Really the ideal situation is to have checked their cholesterol levels 15 years prior, and seen whether it was elevated, which would imply that they have an elevated risk of having the heart attack, and starting the medication then," Raffi says. ...
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 1
  • Aggregate Sentiment: 0.142735
  • Mean: 0.142735
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Robert Vassar

Overall Sentiment: 0.0524691

Relevance: 0.255495

SentimentQuote
-0.10677"BACE 1 is like a pair of molecular scissors, and what the mutation does is sort of interfere with the way the molecular scissors can cut. It sort of like, dulls the blades," Vassar says. ...
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 1
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.10677
  • Mean: -0.10677
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Lori Beason-Held

Overall Sentiment: -0.216819

Relevance: 0.250184

SentimentQuote
-0.11391"Our study has gone back even further and discovered changes in the brain that occur up to 11 years before any symptoms occur in individuals who eventually become cognitively impaired," says Beason-Held.
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 1
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.11391
  • Mean: -0.11391
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Amyvid

Overall Sentiment: 0

Relevance: 0.21064

Key:

  • Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

HealthCondition: Alzheimer

Overall Sentiment: 0.17555

Relevance: 0.855828

HealthCondition: Alzheimer's disease

Overall Sentiment: -0.123635

Relevance: 0.482454

HealthCondition: heart disease

Overall Sentiment: 0

Relevance: 0.316924

Disambiguation: DiseaseOrMedicalCondition | CauseOfDeath | RiskFactor | Disease | OrganizationSectorReferences:

FieldTerminology: gene mutation

Overall Sentiment: -0.182718

Relevance: 0.380006

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