The word Alzheimer’s straight away flashes of a person who has lost his walking, talking and even swallowing ability, ending up totally dependent on others. Unfortunately, this neurodegenerative disease is spreading its tentacles with over 500,000 people in Britain alone affected by it.
Disappointingly, in the USA, Alzheimer’s disease was the 7th leading cause of death in 2004, which killed 65,829 people, with the number only rising!
This eventually leads UK’s National Health Service, a year’s treatment costs up to £14billion and at over $100 billion in the U.S, making it the third most costly disease after strokes, heart disease and cancer, all combined.
Ah! If this drug proves effective in the global market, an Alzheimer’s patient can forget about those fearful debilitating future – that devastating final stages of the illness.
Thanks to the new jab – a therapeutic ‘vaccine,‘ which unlike other vaccines is used to treat the disease after its development.
Unlike the existing drugs for Alzheimer’s that can, though, delay the symptoms progress, whose effect generally wears off quickly — in comparison to the new drug – the new vaccine provides hopes of holding the disease at bay indefinitely.
Alzheimer’s Society’s Professor Clive Ballard said,
A successful vaccine would be a groundbreaking treatment advance for the 25million people with Alzheimer’s disease worldwide.
Just six years to go. The Alzheimer’s patients, who are at the early stages of the disease, and are only to look forward to a debilitating future, can build hopes of not reaching the final points of the illness’ worst symptoms.