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Early-stage treatment for Alzheimer's may slow cognitive decline
A Decatur couple is hopeful the treatment will by them time. For a guy who speaks multiple languages and functions at a high level, the symptoms have been frustrating.
DECATUR, Ga. - Steven and Bonnie Salomon of Decatur have been married 54 years.
So, when Steven, now 77 and retired from running a PR company, started having some memory problems, Bonnie, knew something was off.
She says he had always had memory issues, but this felt different.
"He would not remember something I might have said a minute before," Salomon remembers. "He definitely would forget important things and not remember what was supposed to be done, and his personality began to change just a little bit."
Steven was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, or MCI, an early stage of memory and cognitive function loss.
A spinal tap revealed Salomon has an increased level of amyloid beta protein in his brain, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
For a man who speaks several languages, the changes have been difficult.
"Extremely frustrating, frustrating and annoying," Steven Salomon says. "In my case, it's short-term memory problems."
Bonnie Salomon says some people may not want to know they may be in the early stages of Alzheimer's.
"For us, knowing enabled us to move forward and to do everything we could and to look into what was possible in terms of medication, in terms of programs," she says.
Steven Salomon is now a patient in a program at Emory for MCI patients, and he is taking Aricept, an Alzheimer's medication, and doing well enough to continue writing a book with a friend.
"My short term memory seems a little better," he says.
Bonnie Salomon believes the Aricept is helping.
"I think he's holding steady," she says. "I really do."
Working with the Alzheimer's Association, the Salomons are constantly looking for new treatments coming down the pike that might help slow Steven's cognitive decline.
Dr. Jonathan Liss, a neurologist at Columbus Memory Center, says progress has been frustratingly slow.
"I've been in this field roughly 30 years," Dr. Liss says. "When I started, there were no therapies. And, over the last 20 years, there have been therapies that have been only a very modest, superficial benefit, and certainly not to everybody."
That could be changing.
Dr. Liss and the Salomons are excited about an experimental Alzheimer's treatment he has helped study in clinical trials.
Lecanemab is monoclonal antibody that binds to the destructive amyloid protein in the brain, and is the first of several treatments, Dr. Liss says, that could finally slow down this disease.
"In order to get a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, you have to have a protein that we don't want called beta amyloid," Liss explains. "That is the cornerstone. That's what these drugs take out."
Over 18 months, lecanemab slowed cognitive decline in early stage Alzheimer's patients by 27%, compared to the patients who received the placebo treatment.
"What we are what we are looking at is more good time, more time where a person is the center of their family, more independence, more freedom, more opportunities to make plans for the future, more time to be the person that he or she is," Dr. Liss says. "And that's what this drug will offer."
The treatment has small risk of severe side effects, like bleeding in the brain, especially for patients on blood thinners.
But Bonnie and Steven Salomon feel hopeful.
"I'm grateful that we had this at a time that we do when there's so much possible, that, if this had happened to us 10 or 15 years ago, we might not have been as optimistic as we are today," Bonnie Salomon says. "So I'm I feel very blessed and very grateful for that."