Nearly Half of All Seniors May Have This Type of Dementia
With all the advances in medicine, the
human brain remains a largely undiscovered frontier. Luckily,
neuroscience is constantly evolving, and every year, we’re getting
closer to uncovering better ways of treating patients with brain
disorders. In a recent study, researchers established and quantified the
prevalence of a brand new type of dementia called limbic-predominant
age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (or LATE).
According to the paper, as many as 40% of all older adults and nearly
half of all Alzheimer’s patients display brain changes consistent with
LATE. This is an extremely important discovery, as patients exhibiting
symptoms of LATE may require a different type of treatment than
Alzheimer’s patients. This is neither good nor bad news, as we still
don’t know if LATE is easier to harder to treat than Alzheimer’s
disease.
The research will soon appear in the Acta
Neuropathologica journal, and it offers a comprehensive idea of how
common LATE is.
Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy symptoms are
comparable to those of Alzheimer’s disease. Symptoms appear in older age
and involve memory loss and issues with reasoning.
The research in question examined more than
6,000 clinical data and brains from 5 countries and 3 continents.
Although the condition mimics Alzheimer’s, it looks very different in
the brain. This allowed the researcher to determine that nearly 40% of
the sample and nearly 50% of those that belonged to Alzheimer’s patients
had LATE.
“Given older ages are when dementia is most
common, the LATE findings are particularly important. Although there
are many differences between the studies that are combined here — from
design to methodologies — they all reveal the importance of LATE and
suggest our findings will be relevant beyond any individual country or
region of the world,” stated Dr. Carol Brayne, a British academic and
Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Cambridge to
Science Daily.
The importance of this study is that it proves that LATE is a very
common condition that goes hand in hand with Alzheimer’s disease and
dementia. While this is a major leap in researching LATE, there are
still many things we don’t know about this condition. For one, it
remains unknown where people of different ethnicities have a different
risk of developing the disease. The next step for the research team is
designing a trial with potential preventative treatments for LATE and
Alzheimer’s.