Alzheimer’s disease is one of the great challenges of society. Today there is no cure and little is known about the origin of one of the most devastating neurodegenerative diseases. But the reality is that there are 600,000 people affected in Spain and will be 1,200,000 in 2025, according to the Spanish Confederation of Families of Alzheimer’s and other Dementias (CEAFA).

Andrew, 59, did not think twice when he volunteered to participate in a project aimed at early diagnosis of a disease is detected late. The key to the implementation of effective treatments is just ten years before the first symptoms, when the brain starts to record small changes that predict the future onset of Alzheimer’s.

The Center for Research and Advanced Therapies (CITA-Alzheimer’s), located in San Sebastian, analyzes the brain through the images. The project aims to identify Alzheimer Gipuzkoa genetic markers through one of the most advanced imaging systems, a scanner nearly 12 tons and 3 tesla (the usual is 1.5 on those used in hospitals). The study, one of the most comprehensive being carried out, has managed in less than three months to mobilize 500 volunteers. “The medicine of the future tends to be personalized, predictive and participatory,” said Gurutz Linazasoro, a neurologist and scientific director of CITA-Alzheimer’s, a foundation created in 2007.

Andrew has just emerged from the lumbar puncture test. The extraction of a sample of cerebrospinal fluid is one of the key parts of the study, in its first phase, because this fluid is analyzed the deposition of amyloid-b protein in the brain, one of the more specific signs Alzheimer’s pathology.

In a room where he is recovering from the puncture, Andrew, one of 63 volunteers who passed some tests, has relaxed his experience: “The truth is coming a little nervous but I hardly heard. Why am I encouraged? It is a way of learning, beyond talking about football or have a drink with friends. ”

Arigita Ernesto Sanz, director of imaging, highlights the success of achieving hundred healthy volunteers: “The response has been spectacular. In a similar project in the Netherlands took me a year to find a 20 “.

Along with lumbar puncture, which 60% of volunteers have agreed, add blood tests and neuroimaging two sessions, one structural and one functional. Aged between 50 and 65 years, volunteers are split almost 50% among people at risk (family history, memory problems, etc.) and healthy individuals. Each patient will know the outcome of the tests.

The study will collect clinical data, neurological, statistical, psychological and nutritional. This last section also provide valuable information about food habits, according to the researchers, may influence the disease and rarely covered by other similar studies. The project, which began with the economic contribution of a family from San Sebastian and maintained in times of crisis thanks to the collaboration of central administrations, regional and provincial levels, in addition to the Kutxa Social Work, will monitor the volunteers during the next few years to check the status of their cognitive performance, brain volume and the changes that are experiencing.

After the first data from the first phase of research, Alzheimer’s CITA-start the second phase, which already had 2,000 or 3,000 people. It will be then that will test these potential specific markers for more decisive conclusions and validated as effective screening tools.

“It is frustrating to new treatments aimed at combating the disease mechanisms are not working. Diagnostic tests such as PET are expensive and difficult to make and doctors in general are not doing the work of a lumbar punctures apparently healthy person who only has memory lapses. And even less, if not demented. It’s the same debate that is open in the scientific community, “explains neurologist Pablo Martinez Lage.

The ultimate goal is to know when symptoms occur, when they start these first neurons to die, the first changes in the brain to neuronal degeneration. In this sense, the study is accompanied by a side project called risk Networks is to find the mechanisms that the brain uses to mask the failures.

The CITA-Alzheimer’s researchers work with the hope that one day could pose a real specific prevention of Alzheimer’s. To this end, the only way is to define populations at risk. “No one is free of Alzheimer’s, a disease is more democratic. But a trained brain responds better, “notes Martínez Lage.