Alzheimer's treatment 'could be developed in five years'

A breakthrough drug treatment for Alzheimer's disease could be as little as five years away, researchers at Lancaster University believe.

The team at the university is currently part of a €14.6 million (£12.9 million) project trying to develop a cure for the disease with a drug that blocks the protein plaques that cause Alzheimer's.

"We can now now detect the disease with quite a degree of certainty, even before the clinical symptoms emerge," said Professor David Allsop of Lancaster University.

"So in the future we can detect it early on and treat it even before the memory impairment develops."

Dr Allsop went on to say that the cost of caring for people with Alzheimer's disease is far outweighed by the cost of developing treatments.

Recently, researchers at Yale University proposed the use of the hypertension drug guanfacine, which prevents the accumulation of a certain protein in the prefrontal cortex, to reverse the effects of memory decline.

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