South Carolina fights against Alzheimer's
By Ellen Meder
Recent reports show from The Alzheimer's Association show that South Carolina is among several of the states with the highest death rates associated with Alzheimer's disease.
The 2009 Alzheimer's disease Facts and Figures Report, released in late March, estimated that by 2010 there will be over 80,000 reported cases of Alzheimer's disease in South Carolina. The report also indicated that in 2005 the state ranked third highest in the nation for number of deaths attributed to Alzheimer's on death certificates when statistics were age adjusted, with 32.4 cases per 100,00 people, behind only Tennessee, Washington and Louisiana. The national age adjusted average is 22.9 people with Alzheimer's disease per 100,000.
However, South Carolinians do recognize the need to take action and are also among the states leading in fundraising and research for the disease, which leads to serious memory loss and dementia in many elderly citizens. The South Carolina Chapter of The Alzheimer's Association is currently in the middle of a fundraising season with a full schedule.
The April 28th Carroll A Campbell, Jr. Memorial Golf Classic at The Winderemere Club in Blythewood, SC raised over $50 thousand to benefit Alzheimer's research efforts.
Carroll A Campbell, the former governor of South Carolina battled Alzheimer's for four years before he died in 2005 of a heart attack. Iris Campbell, the widow of the politician beloved my many Republicans, is now speaking out about the disease after nearly four years of silence on the subject.
"It's a terrible disease," Campbell said in a press conference before the tournament. "I think everyone should stop and look at this: at some point in their life they'll have someone they love come down with this disease."
Campbell lamented that the worse part of the diagnosis of her husband was that there was no cure yet.
"When you have cancer, which is so horrible, there are drugs that are there to treat it. We still don't have treatment for that, all you can do is get in programs," Campbell said.
Many of the programs that Alzheimer's patients and their families participate in are funded through The Alzheimer's Association, but the organization also helps research on the causes of Alzheimer's, as well as the development of pharmaceuticals to treat the disease-there are currently two treatments that slow the process of Alzheimer's and over 200 awaiting FDA approval.
Other independent organizations also donate funds to highly deserving labs in a very competitive market for cutting edge research, including the National Science Foundation (NSF).
One South Carolina research outfit which receives NSF funding as well as Alzheimer's Association funding are some of the chemical engineering professors at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC. Dr. Melissa Moss leads the research at the university lab which is working to better understand the causes of Alzheimer's Disease in the hopes of one day preventing it. With recent work published in 2008 editions of the Journal of Neurochemistry, Moss focuses her research on the creation of neurological plaques by amyloid-beta proteins in the brain, one of the two primary deposits that lead to decrease brain function and eventual stroke in AD patients.
"Most, but not all, researcher ascribe to a theory that aggregation of the amyloid-beta protein is a defining event in the disease that initiates the pathogenic cascade that lead to AD," Moss said. "The focus of our research is to understand this self-assembly process of the protein, to describe it kinetically, and to characterize inhibitors that may target specific stages of A? assembly. Correlating the mechanism of action of inhibitors with cellular effects will assist research efforts to design effective therapeutic agents for Alzheimer's disease therapy."
Moss explained that in layman's terms scientists basically understand what needs to happen to prevent Alzheimer's Disease, but that right now it is a matter understanding exactly how to manipulate body chemistry to prevent the disease.
Start up funding from the university lead to Moss and her colleagues procuring over $560,000 in funding through two NSF grants, for $400 thousand and $60 thousand, and a $100 thousand grant from the Alzheimer's Association, attention from which is highly competitive in the biomedical research field. Moss has also received grants in the past from the American Heart Association to fund research on strokes associated with Alzheimer's disease.
Emily Matherly, a third year biomedical engineering student at the university, has been working closely with Moss for over a year and is already astonished at the progress being made.
"It's amazing to be part of a process where I can see measurable, and publishable, results in Alzheimer's research over the course of a year," Matherly said. "Going to conferences, learning, collaborating and having something to strive for keeps everyone in the lab motivated and excited to crack the puzzle. At the very least it's job security with a purpose."
An article in the November 2006 issue of "Science" that Moss referenced there is room for optimism in the field of research, with the corollary that "funding must increase to reduce the mismatch between the rapidly growing economic threat from AD and the limited resources available to fight it."
In 2009, with the first of the Baby Boomer reaching 65 years of age (the start of the prime years for the development of AD) in the next two years, the need for research and prevention is weighing on South Carolina as well as the nation Moss said. RCT