According to new research, an experimental vaccine against Alzheimer's disease appears to restore memory and reasoning power, and will be tested on sufferers next year. Simon Jeffery explains. Alzheimer's is a degenerative brain disorder that affects 600,000 people in Britain. Symptoms include memory loss, language deterioration, poor judgment and indifferent attitude - a sufferer loses much of what makes them who they are.
Nobody is certain and, as yet, there is no cure.
The disease was discovered in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer, a German doctor, who noticed microscopic clumps and tangles in the brain tissue of a woman who had died of an unusual mental illness. These clumps, or plaques, are believed to block sufferers' ability to learn and remember. Mice were put in an elaborate water maze where the exits kept changing. Those with raised levels of a protein called beta-amyloid, thought to cause the clumps in an Alzheimer's sufferers' brain, got confused and found it harder to remember the exits than the mice with less. All the mice were fine when the escape location did not change.