Addiction Treatment Blog

Dementia Treatment

It is not clear yet that damage to the cholinergic pathway is the central deficit in Alzheimer’s dementia. Indeed, it has recently become clear that a number of other neurotransmitters are affected in both Alzheimer’s and other cortical dementias. It is also clear that, because of the interactions between various neurotransmitter systems, it is almost impossible to manipulate one neurotransmitter systems, it is almost impossible to manipulate one neurotransmitter without affecting the others.

Finally, from the vantage point of the 1990s, it seems that many cortical dementias may involve cell protective mechanisms that have been thrown out of gear. Normally, there are a range of mechanisms within cells for neutralizing toxins of various sorts. These often involve the binding of a protein to the toxin, which labels it so that the cell’s own degredative processes destroy the offending agent. In the dementias, however, such mechanisms seem to have been stimulated to the point where the large amounts of cell-protective proteins are produced, to the point where large amounts of cell-protective proteins are produced, to the point that they themselves poison the cell. Whether the stimulus is genetic, viral, toxic (as in aluminium) or some combination of these and other factors is uncertain. The treatment options are to find compounds that will switch off the process or else compounds that will compensate for it. Read more…

Dementia

Part of the problem in finding drugs which may be effective for dementia is that our ideas about what constitutes dementia have been undergoing radical change in recent years. It had been traditional to distinguish between Alzheimer’s dementia, or senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (SDAT) and multi-infarct dementia (MID), which is theoretically caused by small strokes which insidiously pick off brain tissue to the point where an individual’s cognitive function is compromised. Read more…