After decades of disappointments, new treatments and tests are finally here
BY Vanessa Milne
Eight years ago, neurologist Dan Gibbs was sitting in a room with two dozen doctors and researchers. He was getting ready to look at brain scans—not a patient’s, but his own. They would definitively answer a question he had had for years: what was wrong with him?
It started when he was 55 and working as a neurologist in Portland, Oregon. He noticed he couldn’t smell certain things, like flowers. Then he began to smell things that weren’t there, like baking bread, perfume or citrus. He randomly got a clue as to what the cause might be after doing an at-home DNA test to find out more about his family tree. The results showed he had two copies of a gene, APOE4, that increases Alzheimer’s risk. He was shocked. It had never occurred to him that he might get the disease.
At the time, he did not have memory symptoms, but over the next few years, he noticed some mild memory problems, like forgetting his colleagues’ names and having difficulty memorising his new office phone number. That, combined with his background as a researcher, led him to participate in a study at the University of California, San Francisco, that was focused on diagnosing Alzheimer’s.
And now the results were in.
The researchers pulled up the pictures and showed him betaamyloid plaques in different parts of his brain, including his prefrontal cortex and the olfactory area, which controls smell. It was a sign of early-stage Alzheimer’s. Surprisingly, Gibbs was happy: “When they showed me the scans, it was a relief to have a firm diagnosis,” he says.
WHAT IS DEMENTIA?
Dementia is an umbrella term for a group of symptoms contributing to a decline in memory, thinking, reasoning and social abilities. It’s progressive, and some people with dementia will need 24-hour care at the end of their lives.
Fifty-five million people around the world have dementia. While only one per cent of those aged 65 to 69 have it, the risk of a diagnosis doubles every five years between ages 65 and 84. One in four people over 85 have dementia.
But breakthroughs in treatment and testing this year have given new hope to researchers like Dr Don Weaver, director and senior scientist at the Krembil Research Institute at the University Health Network in Toronto.
“There’s genuine room for optimism,” he says. “The research is moving at a faster pace tha
