Alzheimer's D. ultrasound treatment

Attacking Alzheimer’s with ultrasound

Opening the blood-brain barrier allows the body to remove plaque in the hippocampus

February 20, 2015

The plaque abnormalities on untreated transgenic mice (left) and the brain of a transgenic mouse that has been treated with MR imaging-guided focused ultrasound (right), showing reduced plaque (credit: Kullervo Hynynen, Sunnybrook Research Institute)

For the first time, researchers have reversed some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease* in mice using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-guided focused ultrasound.

As KurzweilAI reported in 2012, Sunnybrook Research Institute scientists used MR imaging-guided focused ultrasound to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier (BBB), allowing for more effective delivery of drugs to the brain. The method uses a microbubble contrast agent. The microbubbles vibrate when they pass through the ultrasound beam, temporarily creating an opening in the BBB for the drugs to pass through. In addition, this combination of ultrasound and microbubbles has been shown to increase the number of new neurons and the dendrite length.

In the new study, Kullervo Hynynen, Ph.D., a medical physicist at Sunnybrook Research Institute, and his collaborators studied the effects of using MR imaging-guided focused ultrasound on the hippocampus of transgenic (TgCRND8) mice./.../