Slowing Onset of Alzheimer’s Focus of Nationwide Study

Medical researchers have defined a condition that may be a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease, prompting the launch of a nationwide effort to study possible preventive treatments, including having patients take Vitamin E.

Those who suffer from the condition, called mild cognitive impairment, experience greater than expected memory loss for their age but do not suffer the confusion and disorientation associated with Alzheimer’s, researchers said in a study released Monday by the Mayo Clinic.

About half of the patients who have the impairment will develop full-blown Alzheimer’s within three years, the researchers said. The study, published in this month’s issue of the medical journal Archives of Neurology, was funded by the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health.

The Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study, a consortium of NIH researchers and other experts, has begun the largest public research effort ever to focus on slowing down the effects of the disease. The study will last three years and will include more than 700 people ages 55 to 90 in the United States and Canada. Six of the proposed research sites are in California, including clinics at UCLA, USC, UC San Diego and UC Irvine.

“Over the last few years, I’ve been shocked [at] the number of people coming in with the earliest complaints of memory loss,” said Michael S. Mega, director of UCLA’s Memory Disorder and Alzheimer’s Disease Clinic, which will participate in the study.

Only two sanctioned drugs, Cognex and Aricept, are approved for Alzheimer’s treatment, offering patients perhaps a year of stability before their thinking processes decline.

There is no cure for the degenerative disease, which affects more than 4 million people in the U.S., but delaying it could increase overall quality of life and stave off the deep confusion and helplessness that eventually sets in. If treatment does work, these patients may die of other causes before they succumb to the disease.

Volunteers for the study will be screened through written tests and interviews to confirm mild cognitive impairment. People who have the condition may have trouble recalling very recent events or have problems remembering how to do simple, familiar tasks. But unlike many Alzheimer’s patients, they are fully functional in most social situations.

“There has not been a clear method of evaluating people with memory loss,” said Ronald Peterson, chief investigator at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “We can now differentiate people who meet the criteria for mild cognitive impairment from healthy people, and from those with mild Alzheimer’s disease.”

Once a diagnosis is made, study volunteers will be divided into three groups. Some will take Vitamin E, others will take a placebo, and a third group will take Aricept, a Food and Drug Administration-approved drug prescribed for people already diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Vitamin E, which is thought to have antioxidant properties, was shown in a 1997 study to delay progression to severe dementia by about seven months.

Not everyone suffering from mild cognitive impairment will develop Alzheimer’s, but people over age 65 who have the condition face a significantly higher than normal risk of developing the disease, researchers said.

Based on previous small-scale studies, doctors and researchers hope the Vitamin E treatment will delay onset of the disease by at least a year and sustain mental viability for as long as five years.

Delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s by five years for those who show early symptoms of it could mean a savings of more than $100 billion by 2050, researchers projected.

The study in Los Angeles will begin immediately, with UCLA and USC already actively recruiting applicants. Both clinics plan to offer services in English and Spanish, and all services and consultations will be free.

All participants will be evaluated every six months during the three-year study.

Those wanting more information about the study may view the Web site at: www.memorystudy.org, or call (888) 455-0655.