More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, and in spite of a worldwide effort to find a cure, our mildly effective therapeutic options remain limited to treatments to slow down the disease. While the search for better treatments goes on, many scientists are looking for treatments to prevent the development of AD.
Therapies that prevent disease, like vaccines, are called primary prevention. Measles, mumps, and rubella are essentially diseases of the past (at least in the United States) because our children are vaccinated at an early age. Unfortunately, a vaccine for AD is still far off.
Recently, some researchers have turned their attention toward primary prevention for AD. That these studies are being conducted at all is exciting, as primary-prevention trials are notoriously difficult to set up and manage. Primary-prevention trials require a large number of people to participate for years at a time. Once you have people in ...
