The fear of developing Alzheimer’s disease is so great among seniors that in medical literature it has its own acronym: FDAD. “It’s the disease that most concerns older people, even more so than cancer,” says Stephen Salloway, MD, director of the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital.
That’s one reason he’s excited about two new Alzheimer’s prevention trials underway at Brown. “Like with other major diseases in medicine, the goal is to detect and intervene early to try to prevent problems down the road,” Salloway says.
The first, AHEAD, is testing whether a new drug can reduce the amount of a protein called amyloid that builds up in the brain, which is associated with memory loss. The drug breaks up the amyloid plaques and helps remove them. People who enroll in the trial first undergo a positron emission tomography (PET) scan of their brain.
“We now have the capability to safely see amyloid plaques on PET scans,” Salloway, the Martin M. Zucker Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, says. If a person has an elevated or intermediate level of amyloid in the brain, they can enroll in the double-blind trial.