PREVENT-AlzheimerPREVENT-Alzheimer means Pre-symptomatic evaluation of experimental or novel treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease. The PREVENT-Alzheimer program is the principal clinical research activity of the Centre for Studies on Prevention of Alzheimer's Disease, or StoP-AD Centre. The goal of this program is to study memory and brain changes in healthy people over the age of 55. While some people in this age group begin to develop apparent memory problems, many more may have undetected brain changes that mark the very beginning of the disease long before the onset of symptoms.With rapid advances in technology, such as high-resolution brain scanning methods or the precise examination of brain chemicals, we can now detect early evidence of brain changes. What’s more, we can likely track these changes over time. These brain changes are more likely to occur in individuals who have had either a parent or sibling affected by AD. This is why we require that our participants have a close family member affected by the disease. Double-blind methodsThe program will examine its participants every year for changes in memory, brain chemistry, and scan results. Program participants will be invited to join one of several clinical trials (experiments) run by the StoP-AD Centre to test the effectiveness of prevention strategies. These trials will run typically for two years and will use traditional “double-blind” methods to compare effects of interventions vs. placebo. Double-blind means that neither project staff nor participants themselves will be told who has been assigned to the active agent or placebo groups. A placebo, or a treatment that appears identical to an active agent but is in fact inactive, is used as a control for comparison purposes. The success of the PREVENT-Alzheimer program will stem from the much needed preliminary information generated about promising interventions in individuals who may have pre-symptomatic AD. Prevention is the ultimate cure ! |
