
Breakthrough ultrasound treatment to reverse dementia moves to human trials - Down_n_Out
https://newatlas.com/ultrasound-dementia-alzheimers-human-trials/57725/
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olliej
Ok so the article says this successfully destroys the amyloid plaques, but
does it help cognition or slow the disease?

Specifically for “slowing” it seems entirely plausible that breaking up the
plaques will allow misfolded proteins to migrate (due to reduced size).

Ignoring entirely the there have been multiple drugs that successfully reduced
amyloid build up, with no actual benefit. Eg they did exactly what they were
designed for to no avail.

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WhompingWindows
There's a theory on beta amyloid that it's merely the by-product of other
causative agents, and that as a surrogate end-point for Alzheimer's outcomes,
it's not nearly as useful as symptom reduction, as you state. My professor who
studied AD and dementia likened beta-amyloid to the garbage leftover in a
stadium or outdoor concert: you know something went down, this leftover trash
isn't great, but hard to determine what actually did occur just based on beta-
amyloid.

Of course, the AD research field is still divided and there are many competing
theories. Solving AD and dementia is one of the greatest challenges in modern
science.

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gammateam
Plaque on your teeth is a symptom too:

Do what you can daily, but let a dentist break it up periodically.

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ganeshkrishnan
Alzheimer is weird in that plenty of treatment works in mice but fails in
humans. I suspect it's primarily because we do not fully understand the cause
of Alzheimer.

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JamesBarney
This is because our mouse models of Alzheimer disease are terrible. And pretty
much everything we've tried has been aimed at beta-amyloid.

I think there is a better chance for this therapy because of the way it works,
by transition the microglia over to an anti-inflammatory mode.

If this procedure passed safety trials I wouldn't be surprised if a similar
therapy worked for schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression.

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jf-
I agree that various kinds of immune modulation will be a huge part of
medicine in the future. Promising results vs cancer, seems plausible you could
teach or program the immune system to attack anything in the body once you’ve
identified it. Controlling autoimmunity will also be a challenge.

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JamesBarney
They've already started doing this with cancer. The problem is the cancer
evolves to stop producing the identifiers the immune system was using to
determine what to kill.

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jobigoud
Is there speculation on what this would do to a healthy brain?

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maxander
Probably more harm than good- you probably don’t want ultrasonic waves shaking
your neurons around without a good reason. This sounds like a “kick a TV and
it works again” sort of technology.

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pbhjpbhj
You might not need ultrasound though, eg
[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02391-6](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02391-6).

I can't find the link now, on mobile, but I found reference to using low
frequency sound/light and that (anecdotally) individuals had tried this with
their Alzheimer suffering relatives and had great success, like miraculous
recovery of memory.

I wonder if there is a natural occupational exposure (CRT TV?) that could give
evidence here, like if fewer people long-term exposed to low frequency
sound/light get Alz?

Related: prenatal ultrasound could be significantly damaging,
[https://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12903.full](https://www.pnas.org/content/103/34/12903.full).

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NickM
There was a great Radiolab episode about the lower-frequency stuff. IIRC, the
hypothesis there is that you can stimulate certain types of brainwaves that
tend to run on similar frequencies, so that seems like it's probably working
via a separate mechanism from the proposed effects of the ultrasound
treatment, since ultrasound is way too high-frequency to correspond to any
known brainwave frequencies. Perhaps both treatments could be complementary,
though, assuming they both pan out.

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jbb999
Sounds promising and I hope it works. But until its proven to work well in
humans I won't get exciting about it

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49para
[https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dale-
bredesen](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/dale-bredesen)

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jhayward
Rather than just posting a link, it would be helpful if you would give a brief
explanation of what you find useful or interesting there.

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usmanshaikh06
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQhUxd82Rr0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQhUxd82Rr0)

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heyjudy
Wow. This is amazing. My 96-yo grandmother could really try this because
anything that could potentially improve her QOL would be good.

