“The cost of treatment is likely to lead to an enormous health equity gap in lower-income countries,” says Marc Weinberg, who researches Alzheimer’s at Massachusetts general hospital in Boston.
To find out, Ofer Gofrit of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre in Jerusalem and his colleagues collected the data of 1,371 people who had or had not received BCG as part of their treatment for bladder cancer.
“Simply delaying the development of Alzheimer’s by a couple of years would lead to tremendous savings – both in suffering and our money,” says Prof Charles Greenblatt of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who was a co-author of Gofrit’s original paper.
Nicola Veronese of the University of Palermo in Italy and her colleagues recently analysed the results of nine studies, many of which controlled for lifestyle factors, including income, education, smoking, alcohol consumption and hypertension.
Until recently, this was extraordinarily difficult to do without expensive brain scans, but new experimental methods allow scientists to isolate and measure levels of amyloid beta proteins in blood plasma, which can predict a subsequent diagnosis with reasonable accuracy.
A pilot study by Coad Thomas Dow of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues suggests that BCG injections can effectively reduce plasma amyloid levels, particularly among those carrying the gene variants associated with a higher risk of Alzheimer’s.
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