How can we stop Alzheimer’s in its tracks?

Michela Gallagher, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and her team have adapted an unlikely medication, originally used to treat epileptic seizures, that appears to improve memory impairment in a phase of Alzeimer’s disease that occurs at least a decade before the earliest onset of mild dementia. It won’t completely eradicate the disease, but it could prevent or greatly slow its advance. “If you can slow it down by five years, that means you can decrease the population with dementia by half. You don’t have to be a heroic genius who has connected all the dots in the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease if you can just slow it down. That’s what I’m trying to do,” she says.

(from “The Krieger School at 25”, Johns Hopkins University Arts and Sciences Magazine. Fall 2017)