
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, November 8, 1993                   TAG: 9311080126
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Newsday
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NEW TREATMENTS PROPOSED TO WARD OFF ALZHEIMER'S

Several researchers have proposed new ways to protect the human brain against Alzheimer's disease, preventive treatment that could stave off memory decline by decades.

The findings, reported Sunday at a conference sponsored by the National Institute on Aging, offer hope for the 4 million Americans who suffer from the disease that causes behavioral changes and debilitating loss of memory and reasoning ability, leading to death.

Two teams of researchers announced possible treatments to prevent the buildup of substances in the brain that lead to the brain lesions called plaques and tangles that are biological proof of the disorder. At the same time, scientists here continue to debate whether the observed plaques and tangles actually cause or are a by-product of other processes that trigger the disease.

Dr. Allen Roses of Duke University Medical School, who last year announced finding a gene called apo-E, which in one form increases a person's chance of developing Alzheimer's in late life, said his research team had figured out what the different forms of the gene do - and proposed a possible treatment.

Another research team at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, meanwhile, has targeted another treatment that attacks classic plaques, commonly found in the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers.

Dmitry Goldgaber said the Stony Brook team has isolated a substance called TTR that prevents amyloid-beta peptide from forming amyloid, the sticky substance that clumps together to form plaques.

Goldgaber said it was possible to develop drugs that work like TTR to keep the peptide soluble.

"There is no Alzheimer's without amyloid," said Goldgaber, who cloned the gene for amyloid-beta peptide in 1987. "It is reasonable to believe the brain will suffer because of amyloid formation. No matter how successful diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's is, doctors will have to prevent its formation."

Based on the research at Duke, Roses said: "We may be able to develop a molecule that will mimic how the gene works to protect against tangle formation."

In his earlier work, Roses reported that people who inherited two copies of the apo-E4 gene were eight times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than those with two inherited forms of apo-E3. Everyone inherits two copies of the Apo gene.

by CNB