Alzheimer's and Dementia | 60 Minutes Full Episodes

illness, I can say that the illness stole my husband from me, yes, when a family sees someone with this illness, they do not recognize him, this is not the person I married and that I love, this is not my father or my mother, you have It has been said that FTD attacks people at the very soul of their Humanity this is profound as anything that can happen to a human being robs us of the very essence of our Humanity of who we are Bruce Miller says why many cases are initially misdiagnosed as mental illnesses It takes an average of 3 years and several expensive brain scans to get a correct diagnosis of FTD, so we do not yet know whether it is 20,000 new cases each year, 100,000 200,000, but in young people with nurd degeneration the Temporary

dementia

front is a big problem. one, so if you see someone who suffers from

dementia

at a younger age very strong probability that it is FTD Dr.

Miller showed us this composite image of two of the main degenerative brain diseases versus a temporary dementia shown in blue the disease Alzheimer's disease shown in red very different geography very different clinical manifestations what does blue indicate? is that there is tissue loss when we see tissue loss in that region of the brain we know that people have lost interest in life they are They drive less they care less about other people that loss of empathy Miller says it can produce dangerous behavior , impulsive and even criminal and those with behavioral FTD are rarely aware that anything has changed.

He went from being a loving and caring father and husband and it just seemed like he flipped a switch and had no idea what had changed. He had no idea about Amy Johnson and her husband Mark. I got married in 2006, settled in the small town of Windom in Minnesota, and now have four young children, three boys and a girl. 3 years ago, Amy says Mark suddenly seemed to stop caring about her and her children. That's the first time I remember thinking to myself. What happened? Where did you go? Amy remembers one day when she left Mark in charge of her children, then three and two, only to return home to find the children playing outside, alone on a busy street, while Mark sat inside watching TV V, without realize other days.

He began to display compulsive behavior that she had never seen before. He couldn't stop eating. I started locking up food. He would walk to the supermarket and buy more. I took the credit card from him. He would walk to the supermarket and steal food. I mean these changes that he saw, did you ask him what was happening? Yeah, and he just said, Oh, I don't think there's anything different. It was Mark who began making inappropriate comments to a coworker at the company where he worked as a manufacturing engineer. they fired him mhm and his reaction was oh well I guess that's okay so what's for dinner tonight?

What was your reaction? I was devastated. I was months pregnant at the time with our daughter with your fourth child with my fourth child, so as this progresses, what happens? The end result of this is always death, always death, always death, we have no way to intervene, but we slow down the progression as the FTD eats away at the brain and eventually also causes bodily functions to shut down, that's what leading to death, but Bruce Miller is optimistic and points to promising research both in his lab and funded by NIH grants to scientists across the country, suddenly we have interventions and research underway that give me great hope, when will could you expect a breakthrough?

I hope that in the next five years we can have very powerful therapies on certain variants of the temporary dementia front that can stop at Cold Tracy Lind and Emily Eng Les have no idea if any breakthrough will come in time to help them, if not, Tracy eventually you will lose the ability to speak at all and then the ability to swallow the not being able to swallow part that's what's really scary so I try to live in the present moment I'm not very good at living in the moment so I worry a lot about the future you worry? taking care of myself yes, I care about taking care of you, sure, what will be the most difficult part.

I think the hardest part will be the loss of the relationship. Did Emily tell you this before? I don't think so, as you can see. the caregivers suffered as much as the patients for months Amy Johnson kept Mark at home even when she was a mother of four young children and had a

full

-time job, but his symptoms became increasingly worse, when did it become clear to her that she had to intern him? At one facility I went to an appointment with a psychiatric nurse and she said, I think it's time for you to find a different place because now when you think about something, the part of your brain that tells you it's a bad idea doesn't. it does.

Mark Johnson No Longer Working Mark Johnson now lives in a facility about an hour away from home. He has gained almost 100 pounds due to binge eating, including entering elderly residents' rooms and taking their food. Amy says his care now costs her nearly $7,000 a month out of his pocket. out of his pocket, he would be devastated to know that that is where his retirement savings are going and that they are not going to his family. Crippling costs are common for families with FTD, and it is often difficult to find a facility to care for patients like Mark Johnson, the assisted living industry is not set up for 6'3 and 40 year olds.

How's it going? I'm Bill, how are you? Pleased to meet you. Amy visits Mark as often as she can and invited us to come one afternoon. He told us that he had just Would you like to go home? Do you think you need help? No, so do you understand why you are here? I don't think you'd be okay at home. Yeah. I think Amy thinks I don't want to put words in her mouth, but I think she. She thinks this is the best place for you right now, okay, after another minute, Mark said, okay, see you and we left her a big hug.

Okay, it's clearly painful for Amy to see what FTD has done to her husband and know what she'll do. You have 2 to 5 years to live and two to 5 years to live, so how are you doing now depends on the day? I miss him a lot. Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabrielle García Márquez once wrote about a mythical town in the middle of the jungle whose residents suffer from a mysterious affliction that erases their memories. Today in a region of Colombia called Antioquia, reality seems to be imitating the fiction of a way that may answer questions for all of us, as we first reported last fall, Antioch is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100% safe from developing Alzheimer's disease and As devastating as Alzheimer's is anywhere, this is a particularly cruel version that strikes when people are in their 40s and causes death about a decade later.

It's a tragic situation but a perfect scientific laboratory and now it's the center of a multimillion-dollar NIH study trying to find out for the first time whether Alzheimer's disease can be prevented. These are the Andes mountains and the lush countryside of Antioquia Colombia whose capital Medine was once famous for the murder and drug cartel of Pablo Escobar today Medan or medene as pronounced here is peaceful but for some families here still There is a battle against an insidious disease this mother of a family Cecilia her seven children and grandchildren lost their patriarch Alonso for me my father was number one Freddy the eldest remembers that his father was always willing to join and play with him and his friends he was a very happy person he loved to dance he was a very nice person a very good father before the illness when it started what did you notice that made you think he is different?

He started asking what the date is today if I have to go to work and we were worried that Alonso at that time was in the middle of his illness. He was 40 years old so the memory loss and confusion didn't make sense. His doctor recommended exercise and vitamins but Alonso got worse, forgetting the names of his children, he got lost and became disoriented. His son Victor had to help him get dressed, I gave him his shirt and he I said dad, come, I'll help you put on your shirt and the first thing he did was grab it and put it on his feet.

He understood what was happening to him. There were moments of Lucidity where he asked me and said son, what's happening to me because I don't remember, I don't remember. my children or my wife, I don't know who I am, his son, July, I took him again to see the doctor. When I asked the doctor, I told him, doctor, I'm not leaving. Here until you tell me what's wrong with my father, the doctor sent them to Francisco. Lera, a neurologist at the University of Antioquia, who knew exactly what was happening to Alonzo because he had become the local authority's person in charge of a series of early-onset Alzheimer's cases.

In Medina and its surroundings they became ill very early in life. It all started many years before, back in the 1980s, when Lero was a young medical resident and had read about a small number of people scattered around the world who developed Alzheimer's at age 40, so when A 47-year-old man arrived at his midsize clinic with Alzheimer's-like symptoms. He was intrigued and decided to investigate. You met this man and decided to go to his place of origin. Go to the town where he lived. Lera learned that the man's father and grandfather had also lost their memory when they were 40 years old, and a few years later, another similar patient came to the clinic this time.

A 42-year-old woman from a town 40 m away. Dr. Leer and later a nurse, Lucía Madreal, asked if any of her relatives also began to lose their memory when they were young. No, they told us yes, that the father, the uncles, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, so I started to make a small family tree on a page and I showed it to Dr. Lera and I told him, look what we have here, what is this about so many with the same disease and that's why one detective search that lasted more than a decade. Lera and Madrigal traveled throughout the region finding more and more people affected by early-onset Alzheimer's and compiling family trees that they thought could be genetic.

So Madreal spent days in the parish churches reading heavy ledgers where priests for generations had recorded the village's births, marriages and deaths. Thanks to these meticulous records, she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years and make an important discovery: the different families were actually one. large extended family connected Generations ago by common ancestors who had died young with an unusual cause of death written by the priest brain softening no, this is what brain softening looks like in real life Fernando is 46 years old and is a descendant of that The second patient years ago started forgetting things when he was around 30 years old and now he can no longer talk, feed himself or do much of anything on his own.

His aunt takes care of him 24 hours a day, just like she did with his mother when she was. He contracted the disease at the same age. Norelli is in an even more advanced stage of the disease. Despite his appearance, he is only 58 years old. The patients went from mild symptoms to complete dementia and then to death in about a decade, as he showed us. Dr. Laera in these cognitive studies Test results can be seen at 38, even at 38 this man struggled as many older Alzheimer's patients do to copy a complex drawing accurately at 45 and things got worse From there, he lost more at 50 at 51 oh.

Dr. Lera was convinced that what he and his mother were discovering was scientifically important, but even as they found more patients and more related families, he couldn't get anyone outside of Colombia to notice until 1993, when a Harvard professor came to give a talk about Alzheimer's in Bogotá, several hours away, there was a person in the audience Francisco Lera, who came up after the talk and said, you know I have a family here, who has early onset Alzheimer's . Ken KK now at UC Santa Barbara was that, professor, a family could have been four people, it could have been just four people.

But he started to tell me how many there were and while I was listening to him I was so absorbed and captivated by what he was telling me that I changed all my plans, I went with him to Medene and we began a collaboration that continues to this day. They showed Kasac what Lucia Madreal told us. showed: the family tree they had compiled based on all that searching through church records for just one of the affected families dating back to the 19th century. This is a family that continued to develop and cover. these pages are small squares that represent men circles for women the colors in squares and circles mean that the person got Alzheimer's at a young age look, she had these sons and a daughter and then it continued to be passed down from generation to generation when we look at the In the family trees, about 50% of The Offspring suffered from the disease which is a clear signature of a gene, but Gene kic connected Dr.

Lea with a leading geneticist in the US and they began collecting blood samples and searching in ayear a breakthrough, they found a specific. mutation in a gene on chromosome 14 a small defect in the DNA responsible for the suffering of this entire family The discovery was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Lera had identified the highest concentration of early-onset Alzheimer's cases in the world if a person has that mutation they get Alzheimer's yes if they have it they definitely get the disease right there are some mutations where Ely doesn't get it but this one is bad and if you have this mutation you get it in families like El Alonso's discovery of the mutation was a blessing, a crucial first step in finding a way to combat the disease, but it was also a curse because it meant that anyone whose father had the mutation had a 5,050 chance of having inherited it as well.

Do any of you know if? You have that mutation, you know? No, nobody knows, nobody knows well, someone knows. Dr. Laa and his team have been testing for the mutation and compiling a database, but their policy is not to tell family members whether they have the mutation or not, and not even disclose the results to Dr. Please read as there is nothing that can be done to help at this time. Sometimes I ask who will get it but I dismiss that thought because I don't want to think about it. I pray a lot to God so that none of them suffer from it.

I don't want to see my children with that disease. Each of you knows, thanks to your father, that he has a 5050 chance. So what kind of burden does that take on you day after day? I have even prayed to God that if there is a person who has to have the disease, tell God it should be me. I thank God that I am a nurse and could take care of them, but I tell myself first. I had to go through this with my dad the experience of the disease and maybe I will have to go through this with one of my brothers or with several we don't know Sarah told us that she would love to have her own children but given her risk of developing the disease she has I decided not to do it so that my children don't have to go through the same experience as me.

You've been working on this for 30 years. How do you deal with all this pain? It was not the answer we expected, it is that difficult, it is that difficult, but Dr. Lera knew that even in the midst of all her tragedy there could be a ray of hope because what she had discovered in these families of hundreds of people destined to develop Alzheimer's and easily identified with a simple genetic test presented a unique scientific opportunity to test whether it is possible to intervene and stop early on the set and perhaps all Alzheimer's disease before that part of the story begins when we return.

Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's right now, and given the aging baby boomer population, that number is expected to nearly triple in the future, but unlike many other major causes of death, there is no effective treatment. . An Alzheimer's diagnosis is essentially a recipe for a slow descent into oblivion and, consequently, an exorable loss of the memories, spatial skills, and ability to think that make us who we are. We are early-onset Alzheimer's patients, like the hundreds of relatives in Colombia, we are a small fraction of the total, but for scientists they could be everything because they are offering researchers something they have never had before: a way to test whether intervention early before any symptoms begin. could stop the disease in its tracks, answers are still years away, but with more than a thousand Americans developing Alzheimer's every day, a way to prevent it can't come soon enough like the scene we witnessed in Dr.

Pierre Trio's exam room. at Banner Alzheimer's Institute in Phoenix is ​​one that plays out in neurologists' offices every day, so if I asked you what city we are in right now, what would you say? You know, I don't know when. Norm, 72, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the typical late-life thing that many of us fear starts with mild memory and thinking problems and progresses to dementia. Who is that young girl over there Betsy Betsy and is she a friend? Yeah, how do you know Betsy? Because I've been loving her for a long time, okay, is she your sister? a little of both, aha, is she your wife? um, I don't think so, she's fine, she's fine, I think you're a really good person.

I wish it were. They have been married 51 years, unlike early-onset Alzheimer's. No single gene has been identified that causes this. Now touch your nose. There is no way to know who among us is destined to contract it. What percentage of all people will get Alzheimer's? 1% of Americans age 60 and older will have a dementia such as Alzheimer's disease, but by the time you reach 85, that percentage approaches 40 percent. that's a dogen uh and uh these are Goa Alzheimer's disease has been named by the World Health Organization as the West's next pandemic. We have to do something to leave it behind.

You can draw the numbers on a clock, but Dr. Claudia Kos a? Irvine, a leading Alzheimer's researcher and physician at the University of California, said she is frustrated that she cannot offer her patients any hope. Wow I have to say I've been doing this for a third of a century and when I started I just never would have believed that we wouldn't still be closer than we are now to making a real difference, it's been a bit of a let down so it hasn't It was due to lack of trying. Kos gave us a brief introduction to the telltale signs of Alzheimer's around the world. brain after the autopsy, in each place you see a brown spot that is a scillating ameloid plaque, in contrast, you see these black things that tend to have a triangular shape, that is what we call neurofibrillary tangles.

The relationship between plaques and tangles is not

full

y understood, but because it is tangles, plaques have been shown to accumulate in the brain before tangles and years before patients develop symptoms. Pharmaceutical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s developing drugs to clear the brain from the disease, and hundreds of millions more to test. those drugs in patients like Norm of all the trials that have been done what percentage have been successful about 1% in other words, a complete failure, so what does that say? Do you believe well? He says that loving him is not the right thing to do or it is not the right thing to do.

It says we have to eliminate it earlier in the process, before all the other things happen. Cascade later, you know, if you give a polio vaccine once someone has polio, you can understand why it doesn't work, you're saying that maybe those drugs haven't worked because the person already had exactly Alzheimer's and maybe if they If we give it early enough it might work, but how can you test drugs on people before they develop the disease when you don't know which of us is going to get it? Good morning Mr. Dr. Terio and the executive director of the Banner Alzheimer's Institute, Dr.

Eric Ryman, realized that there was a place where you could find out who was going to receive antioch for Alzheimer's. That's when my phone started ringing. By then, Ken KK had been studying the Colombian. The extended family of 15 years got a call from the Banner people and they said, You know you have this family. We know when they will get infected. We know who will be infected. Can we start treating before the disease attacks? Kasa connected Tero and Ryman with Dr. Laa, who at the time had identified hundreds of people who carried the genetic mutation that guaranteed they would suffer from Alzheimer's in the prime of their lives.

Ryman and Tero traveled to Medina and met with healthy and sick members of the community. ex extended family is this particular family in the world um extraordinary there is nothing like it the idea that this concentration exists within about 100 miles of each other is just an extraordinary phenomenon and a perfect scientific laboratory to lay the groundwork for a large clinical trial Banner took a group of his family members from Medine to Phoenix to perform pet scans with the goal of comparing the brains of those with and without the mutation years before memory loss began when they were in their 30s.

Dr. Ryman showed us the results. This is someone who does not have the gene they do not have plaques in the brain but in the family members with the mutation it was a different story extensive deposit of yellow in the brain which is red red is more yellow but yellow is also in The images showed that yellow plaques accumulate in the brain more than a decade before memory loss begins, so if a drug could eliminate that red and yellow, perhaps it could be prevented. the illness. Banner developed a plan for a multimillion-dollar drug trial and called a meeting with leading scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and NIH representatives.

At the end of the meeting, each scientist was allowed to say a final thought and Francisco had the last word. Read and paused long and you could hear a pin drop in the room. for them, emergencies, we, the families, we are waiting for you, they are waiting for you, that's the point where you know we got goosebumps and we said we really have to make this work, what we really do and we they made with a $15 million commitment from NIH and another. 15 million from the philanthropist and the rest from the pharmaceutical company Genentech the trial of an immunotherapy drug to eliminate plaque from amalo enrolled its first patient three years ago and they have been enrolling more people since they told me about this toy and I say that Yeah.

I'll go right away and whatever you need, I'm here Freddy and all his brothers signed up. The plan is to enroll a total of 300 extended family members who are healthy and do not have memory loss yet, 200 who have the mutation, and one other. 100 who do not do it that way, no one will know their genetic status simply by being accepted in the study of the 200 with the mutation, half will receive injections of the drug, the other half will be injected with a harmless Placebo, the study is double blind, neither will the patients nor The researchers will know who gets what they have to come every 2 weeks for at least 5 years, long enough to see if the group taking the drug does better than the group taking the placebo.

Final results are not expected until 2022. Is this the first? It is the first time in all these years of seeing these patients that they have been offered hope. Yes, this is the first time because in the past we only offered them education, better quality of life, but there is no hope of having a proper solution and now they have great hope. I hope what would be the best result. No one who receives immunotherapy experiences any worsening in their thinking or memory ability. It doesn't change at all. It does not decrease. It would be fabulous. It is an ambitious goal and would be just the beginning if it is achieved. a difference for them I think there is a reasonable chance that I could make a difference for the rest of the people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease tell me which hand I am touching and that, of course, is the ultimate goal of helping to prevent this late form in the life. of Alzheimer's to which we are all susceptible, the hope is that one day we can all be screened and, when necessary, treated before problems begin, it could be the case that, just like when you go to the doctor to get checked cholesterol in your blood to see if he needs medication to lower his cholesterol, I would go and do a pet scan for him and it would be part of routine prevention.

What happens if the medicine eliminates the amalgam and they still get the disease? I think that will mean there are other things we should aim for besides loving it, but would you say the drug test was successful? IST is saying yes. I think we need to know the answer to whether the field has been focused on amalo plaque removal for the past 15 years. has been a failure, if this test doesn't work, at least they will know they need to go in a different direction. You know, Victor. All other drug trials over the years have failed. You know it is, but this goes. be the exception this is the exception if it works this saves this community wouldn't that be amazing? that would be amazing for me.

I am always impressed that these families who come from such a remote part of the world have the potential to inform everyone around the world about a path forward to conquer simers. The study has already enrolled all of its participants and the NIH recently awarded up to $4.8 million in additional funding over the next 5 years, although it's too late for Fernando, the early-onset Alzheimer's patient cared for by his aunt died this spring at the age of 47 from pneumonia. Anyone who has had experience with Alzheimer's disease knows the agony of watching someone fade away while stealing their memory and, ultimately, one's very identity.person.

Tonight we're going to show you an experimental way to try to combat Alzheimer's. It's been tested on only a handful of patients, but it caught our attention because of the doctor involved, Dr. Ali Rosai, whose 60 Minutes show came to light 20 years ago. Dr. Rai is a neuroscience pioneer who has developed treatments for Parkinson's. Diseases and other brain disorders over the past year we followed this master of the Mind as he attempted to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease and its worst symptoms using ultrasound. We saw a cutting-edge approach to no-cut brain surgery. If we can, we shouldn't.

I'll be doing brain surgery. You are a brain surgeon. I am, but I should be out of a job because brain surgery is cutting the skin and opening the skull. It can be barbaric. You're going in right there. It looked like a scene from a movie. sci-fi movie makes a Halo-wrapped patient pushed into a ready tube a little more comfortable while a team of doctors manipulates his brain from the other side of the glass gets high modulation power 3

minutes

okay, we're ready to go Dr. Ali Rai allowed us to witness his revolutionary attempt to use ultrasound to slow cognitive decline in three patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

It had never been done before. There is no medical CES here. Medicine is advancing with calculated risks and pushing boundaries, so we are targeting these areas. Dr. Rai and his team focus on these red spots on the patient's brain scans. Red indicates the denser beta ameloid protein. The gummy protein is thought to play an important role in Alzheimer's by disrupting communication between brain cells. People with Alzheimer's build up much faster and over time, these protein aggregates we call plaques like Plax and the arteries continue to build up and impact function. There are two FDA-approved medications on the market that can help break up that brain plaque.

Atak canab was approved in 2021, followed by lmab last year, both are given intravenously, but they work slowly, you usually go to the clinic, they put an IV in and you get the antibody infusion over 1 to two hours and you have You have to do it once a month or twice a month for 18 months or more and during those 12 to 18 months the brain continues to progress Alzheimer's is not going away it takes that long because the medications have a hard time getting through something called the blood-brain barrier, This tight filter of cells that lines the blood vessels to prevent toxins from leaking. to the brain but it also prevents almost all medications from entering, we believe that is what is causing the discontinuation of BB opening this year.

Dr. Rai thought he could solve that problem with ultrasound, the same technology that has been used for 70 years to give doctors a view of organs and fetal development well, you're fine, come back, he chose ultrasound because it penetrates easily the skull and can be focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass to help open the blood-brain barrier and allow medications to precipitate in this way. We are getting the payload, the therapeutic payload exactly in the area that it needs to go with high penetration, but we have to be careful because we want to be sure about it.

You don't want to manage too much. You don't want to open the blood. It's too complicated because if you open it too much of what could happen bleeding in the brain you can have swelling in the brain you can have many other problems so you have to do it right we will show you exactly how it worked and the first results in a minute but to understand why one of the most prominent neurosurgeons in the country is betting on ultrasound, okay, open and close your hands for me, you have to go back to 2002, when Dr. Rai first caught our attention in a story about the treatment of Parkinson's disease, Morly Safer. a tongue out very good Dr.

Rai was one of the first to implant a pacemaker-type device in the brain that stopped the uncontrollable movements suffered by parking patients. It's like traveling through a labyrinth like in Greek myth and around every quarter you have that bloodthirsty monster. that can jump out at you, so you need to be careful to avoid these areas, that type of implant surgery is now routine for advanced Parkinson's. Dr. Rai wrote hundreds of scientific papers, obtained dozens of patents, and presented his Parkinson's research to Congress and Congress. House, he could have gone to the Research Center in any big city, but true to form, he decided to try something different and move to Morgantown, West Virginia, where he is the executive director of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute.

It was a fantastic move because we can achieve There are so many things that would have been difficult at other institutions. Sometimes at larger institutions you may not be as hungry. You may have a thousand different agendas and priorities. We believe we have a very agile team that can get results quickly. As in 2019, this is a video Dr. Eyes' team took when they were among the first to use ultrasound to treat tremors for 15 years. Dan Wall had been suffering from essential tremor, a neurological disorder, okay, now you have a hat, okay, very good, rai. The team focused the ultrasound on a part of the brain called the thalamus to destroy a precisely sized patch of tissue that doctors believed was responsible for the tremors.

These are the 980 elements that converge right there. The wall was awake during the procedure. Touch my finger with yours after 2 hours. The 71-year-old's tremor had disappeared. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. Leave it alone. You got it. I have a very good show. Yes, wow, I appreciate the Lord. That success helped convince Dr. Aai. Good morning, that focused ultrasound could be adapted. patients with other brain disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, my first symptoms I noticed were that I was having trouble writing at work. Did you think you had Alzheimer's? No I didn't Dan Miller is only 61 his wife Kathy started noticing changes four years ago she hit him pretty good and then I realized he was having problems his clothes would be inside out and that kind of stuff just little things , just little things, yes, a scan of his brain revealed what he had been hiding.

Mr. Miller had large amounts of beta ameloid the red spots indicated an accumulation of those beta ameloid proteins the so-called brain plaque a marker of Alzheimer's Dr. Rai explained to Miller that he could not cure him of the disease but hoped to slow its progression Why participate in the trial if it's not a cure? I have to explain to you that I was at the point that you know, like in Dante's Inferno where he says abandon all hope, you who come here for me, it was just, you know, let's do this, do you know what to do? ?

I have to lose and you are an infusion, sir, that's how it worked hours before the procedure. Miller received intravenous treatment with attac canab, one of those two new drugs to reduce beta ameloid plaque. Miller was then fitted with this million-dollar helmet similar to the Uno that the team used to treat tremor patients by almost directing a beam of ultrasonic energy at a target the size of a pencil. Basically, the patient lies on the MRI table and the head goes inside the helmet and the patient is immobilized with a Halo or a mouthpiece because we don't want the movements to cause errors in our orientation in the brain is that the comfortable thumbs Up once inside the MRI machine they gave Dr.

Rai a 3D view of the plaque he would target in Dan Miller's brain. The next step was an IV Solution containing microscopic bubbles when hit with ultrasound energy the bubbles open the blood brain barrier okay ready we can go in Sonic now let's go the bubbles start vibrating they are moving they are moving, they begin to expand so you can open the barrier. temporarily it is now open for 24 to 48 hours and then resealed, so this gives you a great opportunity for 24 to 48 hours with the barrier open, so now the Therapeutics can enter the brain, you can't hear the ultrasound, that noise is a signal to tell the Rai team that the ultrasound is doing its job.

Very good opening in the blood-brain barrier. Each point represents an area where all the waves converge and open the blood-brain barrier. So this is just a blast if you want to get there. and you're reaching one point, one point and then you move on to the next, even though the patients were awake, they told us they didn't feel anything, it all took a couple of hours and they went home when all three patients were done. received ultrasound treatments with infusion once a month for 6 months, that's another goal right there, the result is that the beta ameloid plaque treated with ultrasound was reduced by 50% more than the areas treated with infusion alone, which is the part top of the head, right there.

Dr. Rai shared the We performed brain scans on three patients and the red indicates a higher density of beta ameloid plaques in the brain, so you can see while treating them with ultrasound, look closely at the areas outlined in white that were targeted by the Ultrasound and the drug you get reduces, wow! that's after you can see the plaques are reduced very significantly by opening the blood rain barrier just in one's area. Dan Miller and the third Pati in the trial had larger areas of their brain targeted with ultrasound and this is their baseline and Then you can see here that after 26 weeks there is a very dramatic reduction in beta ameloid in areas like describes in this white label and now we're going to look at patient number three and this patient underwent antibody infusion therapy plus ultrasound.

You can see this. area that is really surprising, the ultrasound opened the blood brain barrier and the antibody came in faster and cleared the plaques, what was your reaction when you saw this scan? I mean, my jaw dropped. I'm like, wow, I was actually even at the clinic. Seeing the patients, the Pet Scan technician called and said, "Oh yeah, there's a big change." I wonder: how do you know we have to analyze it? It's like no, you can see it on the screen. So what did you think when Dr. Rai shared the scans with you it was surreal, you can really see it, you don't have to be a doctor and understand what's going on there, not even the red is going down, that's amazing.

Kathy Miller says she can also see it in her husband, who slipped up once. for a while, but she hasn't strayed further, he has trouble finding things. I send him to the kitchen to get something and he says he's not there. I say yes, there is. I can see him but he can't. But if that's the worst, that's nothing, you'll accept it, I'll accept it, you have hope for the future. I do, yes, I learned that what I had to do is accept that Old Dan is gone and then start working on the new me. that has a future Dr.

Rai's team told us that there has been no change in the three patients' ability to perform their daily activities since they finished ultrasound treatments in July, now that Dr. Rai has shown that ultrasound Focus ult can remove beta ameloid plaques faster, according to the FDA. approval to use ultrasound to try to restore the function of brain cells lost to Alzheimer's What is the result of breaking down all those plaques of damage that has already been done to the brain? We don't know if it's going to reverse the damage to the brain because Alzheimer's is the underlying cause is still happening, so we have another study that we are looking at with ultrasound, first to remove the plaques and then with the Delver ultrasound at a different dose to Let's see now if we can reverse it or stimulate more the brains of people with Alzheimer's when we get there.

Back, we'll show you Dr. Rai's new way of using ultrasound to reset the brain and help people suffering from drug addiction. The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, that is, as many cells as there are stars in the Milky Way. Dr. Rai has spent 25 years exploring this frontier of medicine the surgical techniques and therapies he pioneered are used around the world Dr. Rai allowed us to see his latest research conducted over the last year at the Institute of Neuroscience Rockefeller in Morgantown, West Virginia, which includes revolutionary treatments for a brain disease suffered by the addiction of 24 million Americans, the results so far have changed the lives of people we knew once trapped by drugs.

Looking back, I didn't have the chance. What do you mean you didn't have the chance? I couldn't do anything without having that. drug um in my system Jared Buckhalter is the 6'3 coal miner's son he was a high school football standout who dreamed of playing wide receiver at Penn State but after a shoulder injury he got hooked on the analgesicsThe first time I took that first pill um, I knew I wanted that feeling for the rest of my life, what does it feel like? It's pure euphoria. She took us to where she said she often went to buy drugs, including heroin.

Everyone in Morgant Town knows to come here he's probably 17 18 years old you know just a kid Buck halter still looks like an athlete it's hard to imagine he was an addict for over 15 years he told us he doesn't remember how many times he overdosed and that I couldn't stay clean for more than 4 days in a row. I didn't know where I was going to sleep some nights. You know, my family didn't want me around anymore. I just did so many things to hurt them. Know? was too much for them four years ago, a psychologist working with Buck Halter introduced him to Dr.

Oi Rosai, who was preparing to perform a new type of brain surgery to treat severe addiction. Our protocol was people who had failed. everything once you've tried everything everything residential programs multiple failures detox multiple times inpatient outpatient multiple overdoses I think he was classified as a terminal stage drug user, meaning the end stage makes you think this is the end of your life , right um and here and that at the age of 34 it was crazy to bring elod Dr. Rai thought he could adapt the technology he helped develop years before to treat Parkinson's disease to treat people with severe addiction that we have We have been able to map with Neuroscience Imaging there is a specific part of the brain that malfunctions electrically and chemically and that is associated with addiction, so it is not just willpower, it is what happens in the brain, it is a brain disease, it is a electrical and chemical abnormality in the brain that occurs over time with recurrent drug use and This can be any substance, such as alcohol, it can be opioids, amphetamines, cocaine, and they all involve the same part of the brain, so its The idea was that with the Parkinson's implant we implant that moving part of the brain that malfunctions electrically and causes tremors.

In this case, we are going to address the regulation of behavior, anxiety and cravings in parts of the brain. Dr. Rai has seen the impact of addiction on his community. The problem is so bad in Morgantown that a vending machine dispenses the overdose antidote Narcan for free. You are based at the National. The Institute on Drug Abuse agreed to support Dr. Rai's attempt to combat addiction with a brain implant in 2019, the FDA gave him the green light to try the groundbreaking surgery that covers Jared Buck Halter's pleas, he agreed to be the first addiction patient in US get implant Dr.

Rai's team interviewed him the day before surgery. The best possible outcome would be, you know, just eliminating the cravings and making me feel a little bit better if you know that if those two things happen, you know, that's it. I could possibly ask at that time I was so desperate for a better life that I was willing to do almost anything and I signed up to do it. I think some people might look at this and think it sounds like an electronic implant in the brain. a little creepy maybe 50 years ago people said a heart implant sounds creepy now it's normal 25 years ago people say what are you doing?

You're putting an implant in the brain for Parkinson's, but it's now a routine part of the standard. of care for advanced Parkinson's this is a video of the 7 hour procedure It's a surgery so new it didn't have a name yet Dr. Rai opened a hole the size of a nickel in Buck Halter's skull and then led a thin wire with four electrodes deep in the jar are you okay? Jared was awake during surgery, why was brain mapping necessary? We have tiny microphones the size of a hair that we place inside the brain and they go slowly with micro robots that go in increments. of a thousand millimeters very slowly we take them to the brain and listen to the neurons talk to each other in addiction we want to find the area in the reward center so that it confirms where we are in the brain once we listen and say okay, that's the sound right, then we put in the final therapeutic pacemaker, what sounds like static electricity, which may be electricity to you, but it's music to my ears, music because Dr.

Rai says it's a sign that he found the right place in the brain for the implant once in place the wire was connected to a device placed under the collarbone okay the electrical pulses it sends to the brain are meant to suppress cravings. Buck Halter said it was painless after surgery the system is adjusted remotely with a tablet it is necessary when they turned on the unit it was an immediate change what was the change I just felt better you know I felt like before I used drugs , but a little better and it was at that moment that I knew I was going to have a legitimate chance to do well in all four Patients with severe drug addiction underwent the implant surgery, one had a minor relapse, another dropped out essay completely, but two have been drug free since their operations, including Jared Buck Halter, who has been clean for 4 years if he hadn't met Dr.

Riah. You wouldn't have gone through this implant. Do you think you'd be sitting here talking to me today? you may be talking to my parents, you know those who have lost loved ones to a drug overdose, um, but you wouldn't be talking to me there's no doubt about that, ah, beautiful, beautiful, the surgery was a success, but opening someone's skull is always risky. Dr. Rai thought he could reach more patients quickly if he used ultrasound. He was already using it to treat other brain disorders and was convinced he was on target. The ultrasound could target the same area of ​​the brain as the implant.

It's brain surgery without a knife. In fact, there is no skin cut. There is no opening of the skull. Therefore, it is brain surgery without cutting the skin. In fact, now this is just the measurement. right side Dr. Rai explained how his team would be the first to treat addicts by aiming hundreds of ultrasound beams at a precise point deep in the brain, so that the area we are treating is the reward center in the brain , which is the AC core. coma that's right at the base of this dark area and then we send ultrasound waves to that specific part of the brain and we watch how sharply on the table your cravings and your anxiety change and we respond to the ultrasound, how are you doing the ultrasound? changing the ultrasound energy here is changing the electrical and chemical Millie or the activity in this structure in the brain that involves addiction and cravings just by resetting them and giving them sort of a fresh start at this point it seems like the brain is resetting or rebooting itself. . and the cravings are less, the anxiety is better controlled, so now that you allow them to interact with the therapist, it is very important to know that this is not a cure but an augmentation of the therapy by reducing the cravings and anxiety that are so overwhelming The therapist is having difficulty working with the patient last February.

We watched Dr. Rai use focused ultrasound to treat Dave Martin, who told us that he has been around friends and family who use drugs his entire life. When did he start using drugs? When he was seven years old. yes I did drugs for 37 years, what kind of drugs were you using? Everything I could get inside the MRI. Martin was shown these images of drug use to stoke his cravings. His legs were moving a lot and he was very agitated. A simultaneous brain scan. It allowed Dr. Rai and his team to immediately detect the area of ​​the tilted core that was most active.

I would like to see the objectives once again. 90 watts of ultrasound energy was delivered to a ready-made gumdrop-sized target. Sonic, let's go inside. Within

minutes

we noticed that Martin's foot, which had been bouncing anxiously, was still and he told Rai's team that those same drug images they showed him earlier were no longer triggering the need for a dose. Heroin is going down. Methamphetamine is also going down. Marijuana is going down. Marijuana is going down well. very, very good, keep playing the data, keep going, it was the best day of my life. I did not experience the same effect as on previous occasions.

You didn't feel like I needed what I want. No, I didn't feel like it. I needed the urge or the desire to use was no longer there, so within 15 or 20 minutes of treatment, the desire and anxiety disappear and we are seeing this pattern in multiple cases, then they can go away after this, they get out of the game . table and go home and how long does this whole procedure last one hour one hour 1 hour have you been around people who still use drugs yeah yeah unfortunately I have um and what happened didn't even trigger me uh I used to use inventively with needles and it was a while ago, not too long ago, but this guy was trying to hit himself and they couldn't hit him and they asked me: can you hit me?

Did you really use drugs? I actually taped them and they drew the blood. You know, before when I drew the blood, I would like to make myself sweat because I couldn't wait to hit myself, but this time it was like God, I hope I don't overdose them and kill them here, you know, but I. He didn't have any urge or desire or anything, so Dr. Rai's team told us that Dave Martin admitted to taking a painkiller pill at a party in December. Still, 10 of the 15 patients in the ultrasound clinical trials remained completely drug-free. Dr Oli Rai. is testing the same ultrasound therapy on 45 more addiction patients and is already considering expanding the use of ultrasound to help people with other brain disorders.

I want to get a Vass here, including PTSD and obesity, let's do it again, this is serious. A business investigation has never been done before. We have to learn more. We have to replicate our findings. Is there any risk in running toward something quickly? There is always risk, but you can't move forward and make discoveries without risk, but we must move forward and take the risk because people. with addiction and Alzheimer's it's not going away, it's here, so why wait 10 or 20 years? Do it now.