The video titled “Alzheimer’s and Dementia | 60 Minutes Full Episodes” is a compilation of investigative reports, interviews, and feature segments focusing on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The video follows the heartbreaking journey of individuals and families dealing with these devastating brain disorders.
The first segment documents the 10-year progression of Alzheimer’s in a patient and her caregiver husband. Viewers witness the struggles they face as the disease slowly diminishes their quality of life.
Next, the video explores frontotemporal dementia, a lesser-known form of dementia that affects personality, judgment, and empathy. The story follows families grappling with the challenges of this rare disease.
The video also highlights efforts to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and features a new approach to brain surgery using ultrasound to treat Alzheimer’s patients. Dr. Jon LaPook, Dr. Ali Rai, and other experts share insights and experiences in the fight against these debilitating brain disorders.
Through powerful storytelling and real-life experiences, the video sheds light on the impact of Alzheimer’s and dementia on individuals, families, and caregivers. It showcases the ongoing research and innovative treatments aimed at combating these diseases and offers hope for the future.
Watch the video by 60 Minutes
Mike and Carol Daly have been married for 53 years like more than 5 million American families they’re dealing with Dementia Carol has been suffering from Alzheimer’s the main type of dementia what makes this story so unusual is that almost every year for the past 10 years we’ve interviewed Mike
And Carol as Alzheimer’s took over her brain even though this is intensely personal they wanted all of us to see the devastating impact of Alzheimer’s on each of them over a decade we should have brought the bread when we first met Carol and Mike in 2008 Carol was active
Conversational and determined to make the best of her failing memory how old are you now 65 65 now I think right yeah Carol’s memory had been spotty for several years I started to notice at home and I used to joke about it to my kids I would say you
Know I think she has Alzheimer’s the way she forgets everything then a doctor told her she really did have Alzheimer’s Mike’s mother had had it now his wife Carol when you heard the word Alzheimer’s what did that do to you that was that stated cuz I saw his mother
What she went through it’s terrible she was walking the streets in the middle of the night and we had to bring her home as Carol’s memory deteriorated she lost her job at a bank and lost her ability to do a lot of what she’d always done at
Home did you used to be a good cook yeah oh yeah what happened it stopped it just I just couldn’t do it what couldn’t you do I didn’t know what to do first the meatloaf oh the meatloaf was that was that was the this it was terrible they couldn’t e
It because I don’t know what I did with the ingredients or whatever they just couldn’t eat it and you’re tearing up it’s It’s upsetting for you I don’t want to be like this I really don’t but unable to concentrate Carol had to give up reading and movies hard for
Someone who’d worshiped Clark Gable oh so handsome so you remember that that I [Laughter] know they told us Carol’s illness had brought them closer but they feared the future my fear is I guess maybe it getting worse worse you know and it probably would and it did
Almost 3 years later when we went back to visit Carol had no idea how old she was 80 no I don’t know you’re actually 67 67 67 yeah and what about her favorite actor do you remember Clark AEL oh yeah that was my yeah who is he oh
I I don’t know about now now Mike a former New York City Cop had to apply her makeup and dress her but he told us this was his chance to repay all that Carol had done for him she had a job she cleaned house she did the wash she made
The beds and she put up with me so what what all that’s changed for us is the rolles now I do the wash I make the beds I help Carol but that’s not what you signed up for Yes I did when you when when we took our oath it’s For Better or
For Worse so I did sign up for it in the beginning but Mike had put on almost 20 pounds over the last two years and started taking pills to reduce anxiety and help him sleep thing is is I could sit here and and feel sorry for myself
But what is that going to do for me at our next meeting one year later when Carol couldn’t come up with words she answered with laughs what kind of thing that’s not right in three years since our first visit she needed constant watching I can’t go out by myself that not like that
So I always have to have somebody around that’s a bad feeling yeah you’ve lost your Independence yep that’s what you do after all these years I can’t give up and I I’ll continue to try and I pray to God that she goes before me cuz I’m not going to put him in a
Nursing home I can handle it but we live a life but that life was a lot tougher when we returned 2 years later by then Carol could no longer remember her last name or this what’s your husband’s name my husband’s your husband’s name yeah the guy sitting to your
Left that big guy who loves you yeah loves Me beyond the memory loss as Alzheimer’s affected more of her brain it was destroying more of her physical abilities she’s losing the ability to control her feet her hands it was 6 years ago that I first met you yeah and at the time you were shouldering all of
The burden and you’re still shouldering all of the burden I mean how are your shoulders they’re sure no doubt about it but you have to do what you have to do Carol at our next meeting two years later conversation with Carol was impossible it’s been almost eight years
Since we first met and since we first sat on this couch yeah without making you embarrassed you remember my name no What’s this called what I’m wearing on my wrist what’s the name of that I don’t know it’s a wristwatch oh does that sound familiar yeah yeah Carol
Reached a point where she was not able to do anything for herself at all she couldn’t feed herself couldn’t go to bedroom by herself face me and Mike had reached the point where he simply couldn’t take care of her by himself so he hired a home care Aid during the day
Costing almost $40,000 a year now Alzheimer’s was hitting them financially on top of mentally and physically what would you say the toll has been of this long journey on you I’m dying I really took a h the stress I thought I had a heart attack to begin with he had chest pain
He wanted to put me in the hospital I can’t go hospital all right what do I do with Cara then she has anxiety attacks part of the Alzheimer’s anxiety attacks may be part of what’s happening to you too it sounds like if you had chest pain
But it wasn’t a heart attack is that what it was an anxiety attack I called it stress move according to the Alzheimer’s Association the vast majority of caregivers say their toughest challenge is emotional stress I can still remember when you said no big deal I can handle this
I yeah I think about that comment I made and I said what a jerk I was well not a not a jerk but just you were sort of near the beginning of your journey and you didn’t know yeah you I I thought this was it you know so she can’t
Remember things so you I see people with the Venture they function normally she can’t walk the impact on everybody else is enormous today one year later 14 years since she was first diagnosed Carol was spending most of her days sitting silently no longer able to understand questions we can’t communicate it’s uh
Lonely let me just get them so they go on nicely but watch what happened when social worker Dan con put headphones on Carol and played some of her old favorites the words aren’t there but the beat is and the melody is Melody is pretty good in Alzheimer’s older memories are
Usually the last to go but even then a faded distant memory can sometimes be revived and since the music we love is really tied to our emotional system and our emotional system is still very much intact um that’s what we’re connecting and that’s what still works and it was
Tied to his emotional system too he was tearing up I think those tears were happy tears knowing that she hasn’t lost at all you know it was like Wow Wow but the wow did not last when we met this past January Carol now 74 was too
Far gone to react to music she’s so changed just since the last time I saw her and her pulse is as strong as can be and regular I’m feeling it right now so her heart seems strong but she has so deteriorated stand up Carol come on earlier that morning they’d shown us
How hard it is to get Carol ready for the day what didn’t you realize would happen that she becomes a vegetable that’s basically what I feel like she is now my is still too heavy his blood pressure is too high and a few months ago his thoughts were too dark
Ready to put the gun to my head like they really thought of suicide really yeah it got to that point caregiving is really tough hardest job I ever had and that’s from a former New York City Cop but Suicidal Thoughts are not uncommon for people taking care of a
Family member with dementia Mike hired more AIDS so Carol now has 24-hour help it’s draining his savings but allowing him to get out of the house and make new friends and that’s helping lift his depression I leave this at home and when I go out it’s a new mic out there though
But at home he worries that Carol is in danger has she Fallen yes she hasn’t broken any bones no yes just bruises no so now despite years of telling us he wouldn’t put Carol in a nursing home I’m coming to the to the point where maybe a
Nursing home is is the answer for her for her safety 10 days after that and 53 years after their wedding day Mike did put Carol in a nursing home do you still love her I love Carol who was Carol but now Carol’s not Carol anymore when Carol was still Carol that would
Have been the best time to discuss the kind of caregiving decisions Mike daily eventually had to face alone Mike hopes that sharing such intimate details of their lives will help others be better prepared than they were this is a story about about the crul disease you have never heard of
It’s called frontotemporal Dementia or FTD and given the devastating toll it takes on its victims and their families it ought to be much better known than it is FTD is the number one form of Dementia in Americans under the age of 60 what causes it is unclear but it
Attacks the frontal and temporal loes of the brain which control personality and speech and it’s always fatal it is not Alzheimer’s disease which degrades the part of the brain responsible for memory with FTD people either display such bizarre behavior that their loved ones can hardly recognize them or they lose
The ability to recognize themselves that’s what happened to Tracy Lind one day a few years ago as she was standing in a public restroom I was washing my hands hands and I looked in the mirror and I did not recognize my own face didn’t recognize
Yourself no I looked in the mirror and I kept looking I remember I kept looking at this woman wondering who was she this is who she was the very Reverend Tracy Lind dean of the Episcopal cathedral in Cleveland Ohio one of the city’s most prominent preachers and Civic leaders
She was 61 years old when both she and her spouse Emily Les began to notice trouble with things Tracy had always done very well like finding the right word recognizing congregants and friends faces and of course her own that’s when I said oh man I got to go see a doctor
When that happened were were you scared oh I was scared to death Emily what did you think was happening I thought there’s something not right with her brain something on Election Day 2016 Tracy ly L got the diagnosis fronto temporal dementia she has what’s called the speech variant of the disease which
Among other things attacks the part of the brain where language lives sometimes you just you’re fine and you’re on and then there are other times that the words just don’t come out I mean even if I know what the word is some sometimes I feel like I’m playing Bingo and when I
Find the word it’s like I shout it I I feel like an imbecile you know Apple oh yeah apple that’s it and I get all excited this is acutely painful for Tracy because being a powerful effective speaker has always been at the core of her identity one of the first things you
Did once you got this diagnosis was to resign from your job as Dean at Trinity Cathedral why did you take that action so quickly mainly it was I knew I was starting to fail even though I was faking it pretty well since stepping down Tracy and Emily
Have traveled around the country and the world speaking and preaching about her FTD or as Tracy puts it telling the story of dementia from the inside out I was determined to live what I had been preaching for over 30 years and out of pain comes Joy I’m gonna face this
Disease called FTD that I’d never heard of before and I’m gonna see what I can do with it I don’t know if you are aware of how unique this situation is that you are in the middle of this decline from dementia and yet you’re so able to
Articulate what that’s like I am aware of that I think my C curiosity is what’s getting me through it cuz otherwise pH I I’m I’m just going to lay down and and and and roll up in a ball Tracy says she has good days and bad days just in our interview there
Were moments when she was completely in control and moments when she wasn’t and I’m doing some you know I’m I’m I’m I know there’s no do you want help can you help please okay this is the way this very sad illness presents Dr Bruce Miller may be the world’s leading expert on
Frontotemporal dementia he runs a lab at the University of California San Francisco that’s doing cuttingedge research on the two main forms of FTD the speech variant that Tracy Lind has and a behavioral variant that attacks personality judgment and empathy pleasure to see you both again on the
Day we visited Dr Miller’s Clinic he and his team met with FTD patient Thomas Cox and his wife lri at first glance Thomas seems fine but he’s not I’ve got a FTD okay and has it affected you so far no in fact lri Cox says that starting a
Few years ago Thomas lost interest in her in their son and in his work so much that he was fired from his job by now he’s pretty much reduced to looking at photos on his phone that’s Bugatti that’s our dog your dog I can blame the disease I can say that the
Disease stole my my husband yeah when a family sees someone with this illness they don’t recognize them this is not uh the person I married that I love this is not my father or my mother you have said that FTD attacks people at the very soul of their Humanity this is profound as
Anything that can happen to a human being it robs us of our very essence of our Humanity of who we are Bruce Miller says because so many cases are first misdiagnosed as mental illness it takes an average of 3 years and several expensive brain scans to get a correct
Di agnosis of FTD so whether it’s 20,000 new cases every year 100,000 200,000 we still don’t know but in young people with nurd degeneration front of temporal dementia is a big one so if you see someone who is suffering dementia at a younger age very strong likelihood that
It’s FTD Dr Miller showed us this composite image of two of the major degenerative brain diseases front a tempor dementia shown in blue Alzheimer’s disease shown in Red so very different geography very different clinical manifestations what does the blue indicate the blue indicate is that there’s loss of tissue when we see loss
Of tissue in that brain region we know people have lost their interest in life they are Drive they do less they care less about other people that loss of empathy Miller says can produce dangerous impulsive even criminal behavior and those with behavioral FTD are rarely aware that anything has
Changed he went from being a caring doting father and husband and it just seemed like he flipped a switch off and he had no idea that he changed he had no idea Amy Johnson and her husband Mark married in 2006 settled in the small Minnesota town of Windom and now now
Have four young children three boys and a girl 3 years ago Amy Says Mark suddenly seemed to stop caring about her and the kids that’s the first time that I really remember thinking to myself what happened where did you go Amy recalls a day when she left Mark in
Charge of their sons then three and two only to come home and find the boys playing outside Alone by a busy street while Mark sat inside watching TV V oblivious on other days he began to display compulsive Behavior she had never seen before he couldn’t stop
Eating I started locking the food up he would walk down to the grocery store and buy more I took his credit card he’d walk down to the grocery store and steal food I mean these changes that you saw did you ask him what’s going on yeah and
He just said oh I don’t think anything’s different is it it was Mark began making inappropriate remarks to a female coworker at the company where he worked as a manufacturing engineer he was fired mhm and his reaction was oh well I guess okay so what’s for supper tonight what was your reaction I
Was just devastated I was s months pregnant at the time with our daughter with your fourth child with my fourth child so as this progresses what’s the eventual outcome outcome of this is always death always death always death we have no way of intervening yet uh slow the
Progression as FTD corrodes the brain it also eventually causes bodily functions to shut down that’s what leads to death but Bruce Miller is optimistic pointing to promising research both in his lab and funded by NIH grants to scientists around the country suddenly we have interv ventions and research that are
Going on that give me great hope when might you expect a breakthrough I’m hoping in the next five years that uh we will have uh very powerful Therapies in uh certain variants of front of temporal dementia that may stop at Cold Tracy Lind and Emily Eng Les have no idea
Whether any breakthrough will come in time to help them if not Tracy will eventually lose the ability to speak at all and then the ability to swallow the not being able to swallow part that’s what’s really frightening so I try to live in the present moment I’m not very good at
Living in the moment so I worry a lot about the future do you worry about taking care of me yeah I worry about taking care of you sure what’s going to be the hardest part I think the hardest part is going to be the loss of the relationship has Emily told you this
Before I don’t think so as you can see caregivers suffer as much as patients for months Amy Johnson kept Mark at home even as she mothered four small children and held a full-time job but his symptoms got worse and worse when did it become clear to you that you
You had to put him in a facility I went to to an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner and she said I think it’s time for you to look for a different place because now when he thinks of something the part of his brain that tells him that’s a bad idea doesn’t work
Anymore Mark Johnson now lives in a facility about an hour away from home he’s gained nearly a 100 lb due to Compulsive eating even walking into elderly residents rooms and taking their food Amy says his care now caught costs her nearly $7,000 a month out of pocket out of
Pocket he would be devastated to know that that’s where his retirement savings are going and that they’re not going to his family crippling costs are common for FTD families and it’s often tough to find a facility to care for patients like Mark Johnson the Assisted Living
Industry is not set up for 6’3 40y olds how’s it going this is Bill how are you very nice to meet you Amy visits Mark as often as she can and invited us to come along one afternoon he told us he’d just like to go home do you think you need help
No so do you you understand why you’re here no think you’d be okay at home yeah I think Amy thinks I don’t want to put words in her mouth but I think she thinks this is the best place for you right now okay after another minute Mark said all
Right see you and we left him big hug okay it’s clearly painful for Amy to see what FTD has done to her husband and to know what it will do they gave him 2 to 5 years to live and two to 5 years two to 5 years so how are you doing now
Depends on the day I miss him a lot Nobel prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabrielle Garcia Marquez once wrote of a mythical town in the middle of the Jungle whose residents suffer from a mysterious Affliction that erases their memories today in a region of Colombia called antiochia reality appears to be
Imitating fiction in a way that may answer questions for all of us as we first reported last fall antiochia is home to the largest concentration in the world of people who carry a rare genetic mutation that makes them 100% certain to develop Alzheimer’s disease and as devastating as Alzheimer’s is anywhere
This is a particularly cruel version it strikes when people are in their mid-40s and leads to death about a decade later it is a tragic situation but a perfect scientific laboratory and it’s now the center of a multi-million doll NIH back study trying to find out for the first
Time whether Alzheimer’s disease may be preventable these are the Andes mountains and Lush Countryside of antiochia Colombia whose capital city medine was once famous for murder and the drug cartel of Pablo Escobar today Medan or medene as it’s pronounced here is peaceful but for some families here
There’s still a battle going on a battle against an Insidious disease this family mother Cecilia her seven children and grandchildren lost its patriarch Alonso for me my father was a number one Freddy the oldest remembers his dad always eager to join in and play with him and his
Friends he was a very joyful person he loved to dance he was a really nice person a very good father before the disease when it first started what were you noticing that made you think he’s he’s different he started asking what is the date today do I have to go to work and
We got concerned Alonso at the time was in his mid-40s so the memory loss and confusion made no sense his doctor suggested exercise and vitamins but Alonso just got worse forgetting the names of his children getting lost and disoriented his son Victor had to help him get
Dressed I gave him his shirt and I told him dad come I’ll help you put your shirt on and the first thing he did was to grab it and put it on through his feet did he understand what was happening to him there were moments of
Lucidity where he would ask me and say son what’s happening to me why don’t I remember I don’t remember my children or my wife I don’t know who I am His Son Julio took him back to see the doctor when I asked the doctor I told him doctor I’m not leaving
Here until you tell me what is wrong with my father the doctor sent them to Francisco Lera a neurologist at the University of antiochia who knew exactly what was wrong with Alonzo because he’d become the local Authority party on a rash of early onset Alzheimer’s cases in and
Around medine they were getting diseased very early in the life it All Began many years earlier back in the 1980s when lero was a young medical resident he had read about small numbers of people scattered around the world who developed Alzheimer’s in their 40s so when a 47-year-old man came into his median
Clinic with Alzheimer’s like symptoms he was intrigued and decided to investigate you met this one man and you decided to go to where he was from go to the town where he was living Lera learned that the Man’s father and grandfather had also lost their memories in their 40s
Then a few years later another similar patient came into the clinic this time A 42-year-old woman from a town 40 m away Dr leer then nurse Lucia madreal asked if any of her relatives also started losing their memories when they were young no they told us yes that the Father the
Uncles the grandfather the great-grandfather so I started making a little family tree on one page and I showed it to Dr Lera and told him look what we have here what is this so many with the same disease and so a detective hunt that lasted more than a decade Lera and
Madrigal traveled all over the region finding more and more people Afflicted with early onset Alzheimer’s and compiling family trees they thought it might be genetic so madreal spent days at Parish churches pouring over heavy ledgers where priests for Generations had recorded Village births marriages and deaths thanks to these meticulous
Records she was able to trace the disease back hundreds of years and to make an important Discovery the different families were actually one huge extended family connected Generations back by common ancestors who had died young with an unusual cause of death written down by the priest softening of the
Brain no this is what softening of the brain looks like in real life Fernando is 46 years old a descendant of that second patient years ago he started forgetting things when he was in his late 30s and now can no longer speak feed himself or do just about anything on his
Own his aunt takes care of him Round the Clock just as she did with his mother when when she got the disease at the same age norelli is at an even later stage of the disease despite her appearance she is just 58 years old patients were going from mild
Symptoms to complete dementia and then death within about a decade as Dr laera showed us in these cognitive test results you can see at 38 even at 38 this man struggled as many older Alzheimer’s patients do to copy a complex drawing accurately at 45 and things got worse from there he lost
More at 50 at 51 oh Dr Lera was convinced that what he and madreal were discovering was scientifically important but even as they found more patients and more related families he couldn’t get anyone outside Colombia to take notice until 1993 when a Harvard Professor came to give a talk about Alzheimer’s in Bogota
Several hours away there was a person in the audience Francisco Lera who came up after the talk and said you know there’s I have a family here what has um early onset Alzheimer’s Ken KK now at UC Santa Barbara was that Professor a family could have been four people it could
Have been just four people but he started to tell me how many it was and as I listened to him I became just so absorbed and taken with what he was telling me that I changed all my plans went with him to medene and uh we began
A collaboration that goes on to this day they showed kasac what Lucia madreal showed us the family tree they had compiled based on all that searching through church records for just one of the affected families going back all the way to the 1800s this is one family it just kept unfolding and
Unfolding covering these pages are small squares representing men circles for women the colored in squares and circles mean the person got sick with Alzheimer’s at an early age look she had these sons and a daughter and then it just kept going down through the generations when we looked at the family trees about
50% of The Offspring were getting the disease that’s a clear signature of a gene but what Gene kic connected Dr Lea with leading geneticist in the US and they started collecting blood samples and searching within a year a major breakthrough they found a specific mutation in a gene on chromosome 14 one
Tiny flaw in the DNA responsible for all this family Suffering The Discovery was published in 1997 in the Journal of the American Medical Association Lera had identified the largest concentration of early onset Alzheimer’s cases in the world if a person has that mutation do they get Alzheimer’s yes they do if they
Have it they definitely get the disease right there are some mutations where you don’t Ely get it but this is a bad one and if you have this mutation you get it for families like alonso’s discovering the mutation was a blessing a crucial first step toward finding a way to fight
The disease but it was also a curse because it meant that anyone whose parent had the mutation has a 5050 chance of having inherited it too do any of you know if you have that mutation do you know no nobody know nobody knows well somebody knows Dr laa and his team
Have been testing for the mutation and compiling a database but their policy is not to tell family members if they have the mutation or not and not even to reveal the results to Dr Lea since at this point there is nothing that can be done to
Help sometimes I ask which one will get it but I throw that thought away because I don’t want to think about that I pray a lot to God that none of them gets it I don’t want to see my children with that disease each one of you knows because of your father that
You have a 5050 chance so what kind of a a weight does that put on you day in and day out I’ve even prayed to God that if if there’s one person who has to have the disease say to God let it be me I thank God that I’m a nurse and that
I would be able to take care of them but I tell myself first I had to go through it with my dad the experience of the disease and I may have to go through it with one of my siblings or with several we don’t know Sarah told us she would
Love to have children of her own but given her risk of developing the disease she’s decided against it so that my children don’t have to go through my same experience you’ve been working on this for 30 years how do you cope with all this pain it was not the response we had
Expected it’s that hard it’s that hard but Dr Lera knew that even in the midst of all his tragedy there might just be a glimmer of hope because what he had discovered in these families hundreds of people destined to develop Alzheimer’s and easily identifiable with a simple genetic test presented a unique
Scientific opportunity to test whether it’s possible to step in and stop early on set and maybe all Alzheimer’s disease before it starts that part of the story when we come back Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States more than 5 million Americans
Have Alzheimer’s right now and given the Aging baby boomer population that number is projected to nearly triple by mident yet unlike many other leading killers there is no effective treatment an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is essentially a prescription for a slow descent into Oblivion and in exorable loss of the
Memories spatial skills and ability to think that make us who we are early onset Alzheimer’s patients like the hundreds of family members in Colombia are a tiny fraction of the whole but to scientists they could be everything because they are offering researchers something they have never had before a
Way to test whether intervening early before any symptoms start might halt the disease in his tracks answers are still years away but with more than a thousand Americans developing Alzheimer’s every day a way to prevent it cannot come soon enough the scene we witnessed in Dr Pierre Trio’s exam room at the Banner
Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix is one that plays out in neurologist offices every day so if I asked you what city we’re in right now what would you say uh you know right I don’t know what this moment Norm age 72 has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s the typical
Late in life form so many of us fear it begins with mild memory and thinking problems and spirals into full on dementia who is that young lady over there Betsy Betsy and and is she a friend yes how do you know Betsy because I’ve been loving her for a long time okay is
She your sister a little bit of both uh-huh is she your wife um I don’t think so okay okay think you’re somebody really good wish I was they’ve been married 51 years unlike early onset Alzheimer’s there’s been no single Gene identified that causes this now touch
Your nose no way to know who Among Us is destined to get it what percentage of all people are going to get Alzheimer’s 1% of US 60 or older will have a dementia like Alzheimer’s disease but by the time hit 85 that percentage is approaching 40ish
Per. that’s a dogen uh and uh these are Goan Alzheimer’s disease has been called out by the World Health Organization as the coming pandemic of the West we have to do something to put it behind us can you draw the numbers for a clock but Dr Claudia Kos a leading Alzheimer’s
Researcher and clinician at the University of California Irvine said says she’s frustrated that she can’t offer her patients any hope oops I have to say I’ve been doing this now for a third of a century and when I started I just never would have believed
We would still not be closer than we are now to making a real difference it has been a little disappointing so there it hasn’t been for a lack of trying Kos gave us a quick primer on the telltale signs of Alzheimer’s in the brain after autopsy every place you see a brown spot
That is a scile ameloid plaque in contrast you see these black things that tend to be triangular shape those are what we call neurofibrillary Tangles the relationship between plaques and Tangles isn’t completely understood but because it’s been shown that amalo plaques build up in the Brain before Tangles and years
Before patients develop symptoms you do that pharmac itical companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the early 2000s developing drugs to remove amalo from the brain and hundreds of millions more to test those drugs in patients like Norm of all the trials that have been done what percent have
Succeeded about 1% in other words a resounding failure so what does that say do you think well it says either amalo is not the right thing to go after or it says we need to remove it earlier on in the process before it’s made all the other things Cascade after it you know
If you give a polio vaccine once somebody has polio you can understand why it doesn’t work you’re saying that maybe those drugs haven’t worked because the person already had Alzheimer’s exactly and maybe if we give them early enough it might work but how can you test drugs on people before they develop
The disease when you don’t know know who among us is going to get it so good morning sir Dr Terio and the executive director at the banner Alzheimer’s Institute Dr Eric Ryman realized there was a place where you could know who was going to get Alzheimer’s antiochia that’s when my phone began to
Ring by then Ken KK had been studying the Colombian extended family for 15 years received a call from the people at Banner and they said said you know you have this family we know when they’re going to get it we know who’s going to get it can we start treating before the
Disease strikes Kasa connected Tero and Ryman with Dr laa who by that time had identified hundreds of people who carried the gene mutation guaranteeing that they would be struck with Alzheimer’s in the prime of their lives Ryman and Tero traveled to medine and met with both healthy and sick members
Of the ex extended family is this particular family in the world um extraordinary there’s nothing else like it the idea that there’s this concentration within roughly 100 miles of each other is just an extraordinary uh phenomenon and a perfect scientific laboratory to lay the groundwork for a large clinical trial
Banner flew a group of extended family members from medine to Phoenix for pet scans one goal to compare the brains of those with and without the mutation years before any memory loss began when they were in their 30s Dr Ryman showed us the results this is somebody who
Doesn’t have the gene they have no plaques in the brain but in members of the family with the mutation it was a different story extensive amalo deposition in the brain that’s the red red is more amalo but yellow is also amid this brain had even more the images
Showed that amalo plaques build up in the brain more than a decade before memory loss begins so if a drug could remove that red and yellow maybe the disease could be prevented Banner developed a plan for a multi-million dollar drug trial and convened a meeting with leading scientists pharmaceutical
Companies and representatives of the NIH the end of the meeting each scientist was allowed to say one closing thought and Francisco had the last word Lea and he paused a long time and you could hear a pin drop in the room I said to them ER we the families are waiting for
You they’re waiting for you that’s the point when you know the Goosebumps came and we said we really have to make this work we really do and they did with a commitment of $15 million from NIH another 15 million from philanthropist and the rest from Drug Company Genentech the trial on an
Immunotherapy drug to remove amalo plaque enrolled its first patient three years ago and they’ve been enrolling more people ever since they told me about this toy and I say yes I’ll go right away and anything that you needed I’m here Freddy and all his siblings signed up
The plan is to enroll a total of 300 members of the extended family who are healthy and have no memory loss yet 200 who have the mutation and another 100 who don’t that way no one will learn their genetic status just by being accepted into the study of the 200 with
The mutation half will get injections of the drug the other half will be injected with a harmless Placebo the study is double blind neither patients nor investigators will know who’s getting what they have to come in every 2 weeks for at least 5 years long enough to see whether the
Group taking the drug does better than the group taking Placebo final results aren’t expected until 2022 is this the first time in all these years of seeing these patients that you can actually offer them hope yes this is the first time because in the past we only offer them education better quality
Of life but no hope to have a solution right and now they have hope a big hope what would be the best outcome nobody who receives the immunotherapy experiences any worsening of their thinking or memory ability doesn’t change at all doesn’t decline that would be fabulous that’s a stretch goal and
That would be just just the beginning if it makes a difference for them I think there’s a reasonable chance it could make a difference for all the rest of the people who get Alzheimer’s disease tell me which hand I’m touching and that of course is the ultimate goal to help
Prevent the late in life form of Alzheimer’s that we’re all susceptible to the hope is that one day every one of us could be screened and when necessary treated before problems begin it might be the case that just like when you go to your doctor to get your cholesterol
Checked in your blood to see if you need drugs to lower your cholesterol you would go and get an amalo pet scan and it would be part of routine prevention what if the drug removes the amalo and they still get the disease I think that’ll mean that there are other things
We need to be targeting besides amalo but will you say that the drug test was successful hard IST is to say yes I think that we need to know the answer the answer to whether the Field’s focus on amalo plaque removal for the last 15 years has been a failure if this
Test doesn’t work they will at least know they need to go in a different direction you know Victor All the Other Drug trials that have gone on for years have all failed see you know that yes but this is going to be the exception this is the exception if it
Does work this saves this community wouldn’t that be amazing that would be amazing to me I am always impressed that these families that come from such a remote area of the world have the potential for informing all of us globally about a path forward for conquering out simers
The study has now enrolled all its participants and the NIH recently awarded as much as $4.8 million in additional funding over the next 5 years it’s too late though for Fernando the early onset Alzheimer’s patient being cared for by his aunt he passed away this spring at the age of 47 from pneumonia
Anyone who’s had experience with Alzheimer’s disease knows the agony of watching someone fade away as it steals memory and at the end a person’s own identity tonight we’ll show you an experimental way to try and beat back Alzheimer’s it’s been tested on just a handful of patients but it caught our
Attention because of the doctor involved Dr Ali rosai whose 60 Minutes first met 20 years ago Dr Rai is a neuroscience Pioneer who’s developed treatments for Parkinson’s Disease and other brain disorders over the last year we followed this master of the Mind as he attempted to delay the progression of Alzheimer’s
Disease and its worst symptoms using ultrasound we saw a Cutting Edge approach to brain surgery with no cutting if we can we should not be doing brain surgery you’re a brain surgeon I am but I should be out of a job because brain surgery it’s cutting the skin
Opening the skull it can be barbaric you’re going to go right in there it looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie make a little bit more comfortable a Halo wrapped patient pushed into a tube ready as a team of doctors manipulate his brain from the other side of the
Glass gain high modulate power 3 minutes okay we’re ready to go Dr Ali Rai allowed us to witness his revolutionary attempt to use ultrasound to slow down the cognitive decline in three patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease it’s never been done before there’s no medical CES here it’s advancing medicine
With calculated risks and pushing the Frontiers so we’re targeting these areas Dr Rai and his team are focused on these red patches in the patient’s brain scans the red indicates the densest beta ameloid protein that gummy protein is believed to play a major role in Alzheimer’s by disrupting communication
Between brain cells people with Alzheimer’s it accumulates much faster and over time these protein aggregates we call them plaques like Plax and arteries they keep on accumulating and impacting function there are two FDA approved drugs on the market that can help break up that brain plaque atak
Canab was approved in 2021 followed by lmab last year both are given intravenously but they work slowly typically you go into the clinic and you get an IV and you have the antibody infusion over 1 to two hours and you have to do it uh once a month or twice a
Month for 18 months and longer and during those 12 to 18 months the brain is continuing to progress Alzheimer’s is not going away it takes so long because the drugs have a hard time getting through something called the bloodb brain barrier this tight filter of cells line the blood vessels to keep toxins
From leaking in into the brain but it also prevents almost all of the medication from getting into we think that that’s what’s causing the BB disruption by opening this year Dr Rai thought he could solve that problem with ultrasound the same technology that’s been used for 70 years to give doctors a
View of organs and Fetal development good you’re good come back he chose ultrasound because it easily penetrates the skull and can be focused like sunlight through a magnifying glass to help open open the bloodb brain barrier and allow the drugs to rush in this way we’re getting the payload the
Therapeutic payload exactly to the area needs to go with a high penetration but we got to be careful because we want to be safe about this you don’t want to deliver too much don’t want to open the bloodb brain barer too much because if you open it too much what could happen
Get bleeding in the brain you can get swelling in the brain you can get many other problems so you have to get it just right we will show you exactly how that worked and the early results in a minute but to understand why one of the country’s most accomplished brain
Surgeons is betting on ultrasound okay open and close your hands for me you have to go back to 2002 when Dr Rai first caught our attention in a story morly safer reported on treating Parkinson’s disease W up show me your teeth stick a tongue out very good Dr
Rai was among the first to implant a pacemaker type device in the brain which stopped uncontrollable movements suffered by parking kins son’s patients it’s like traveling through a labyrinth as in the Greek myth and around every quarter you have that bloodthirsty monster that can jump on you so you want
To be careful to avoid these areas that kind of implant surgery is now routine for advanced Parkinson’s Dr Rai went on to write hundreds of scientific papers secure dozens of patents and present his Parkinson’s research to Congress and the White House he could have gone to any
Big city Research Center but true to form he chose to try something different and move to Morgantown West Virginia where he is the executive director of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute it was a fantastic move because we’re able to achieve so many things that would have been difficult at other
Institutions sometimes in the bigger institutions you may not be hungry as much for it you may have a thousand different agendas and priorities here we think we have a very Nimble and agile team that can quickly get outcomes like in 2019 this is video Dr eyes team took
When they were among the first to use ultrasound to treat Tremors for 15 years Dan wall had been suffering from essential tremor a neurological disorder you okay you got a hat on now okay all right very good rai’s team focused ultrasound into a part of the brain called the thalamus to destroy a
Pinpoint Siz patch of tissue doctors believed was responsible for the Tremors these are the 980 elements converging right there wall was awake during the procedure touch my finger with your finger after 2 hours the 71-year old’s Tremor was gone I’m feeling afraid I’m W drop
It you got it I’ve got it really good show yeah wow prise the Lord that success helped convince Dr aai good morning that focused ultrasound could be adapted to patients with other brain disorders including Alzheimer’s disease my first symptoms that I noticed were that I was having trouble typing at
Work did you think you had Alzheimer’s no I didn’t Dan Miller is just 61 years old his wife Kathy began noticing changes four years ago he kind of hit it pretty well and then I noticed he was um having trouble his clothes would be backwards and those kinds of things just
Little things just little things yes a scan of his brain revealed what d had been hiding Mr Miller had a very large amounts of beta ameloid the red spots indicated a buildup of those beta ameloid proteins the so-called brain plaque a marker of Alzheimer’s Dr Rai explained to Miller he couldn’t cure him
Of the disease but he hoped to slow its progression why take part in the trial if it’s not a cure I have to explain to you that I was at the point you know like in Dante’s Inferno where where it says abandon all hope you who enter here
For me it was just you know let’s do this you know what do I have to lose and you are infusion sir here’s how it worked hours before the procedure Miller was given an IV treatment of attac canab one of those two new drugs to reduce beta ameloid
Plaque Miller was then fitted with this million-dollar helmet similar to the one the team used to treat Tremor patients it directs nearly a, beams of ultrasound energy at a Target the size of a pencil Point basically the patient lies on the MRI table and the head goes inside the
Helmet and the patient is immobilized with a Halo or with a mouthpiece because we don’t want movements to cause errors in our targeting in the brain is that comfortable thumbs up once inside the MRI machine gave Dr Rai a 3D view of the plaque he would Target in Dan Miller’s
Brain The Next Step was an IV solution that contained microscopic bubbles when hit with ultrasound energy the bubbles pry openen that bloodb brain barrier okay ready we can Sonic in now there we go the bubbles start vibrating they’re moving they’re moving they start expanding so you can open the barrier
Temporarily now it’s open for 24 to 48 hours and then it reseals so this gives you a tremendous opportunity for 24 to 48 hours with the barrier being open so now Therapeutics can get inside the brain you can’t hear ultrasound that noise is a signal to tell rai’s team the
Ultrasound is doing its work very nice opening at the blood brain barrier each dot represents an area where all the waves all the ultrasound waves converge and open the blood brain barrier so this is just one blast if you will one blast getting there and you’re
Hitting one point one point and then it moves to the next one even though patients were awake they told us they didn’t feel a thing it all took a couple of hours and they went home when it was over the three patients were given the treatments of ultrasound
With infusion once a month over 6 months that’s another Target right there the result beta ameloid plaque targeted with ultrasound were reduced 50% more than areas treated by infusion alone that’s the top of the head right there Dr Rai shared the three patients brain scans with us and the red indicates more
Density of beta ameloid plaques in the brain so you can see as you treat it with ultr look closely at the areas outlined in white that were targeted with ultrasound and the drug you get reduction whoa that’s there that’s after you can see the plaques are very significantly reduced by opening the
Blood rain barrier just in one’s area have you lay back Dan Miller and the third Pati in the trial had larger areas of their brain targeted with ultrasound and this is his Baseline and then you can see here after 26 weeks there’s a very dramatic reduction in the beta
Ameloid into areas as outlined by this white Mark and now we’re going to look at patient number three and this patient underwent antibody infusion therapy plus ultrasound you can see this area which is really amazing the ultrasound opened the blood brain barrier and the antibody went in faster and cleaned out the
Plaques what was your reaction when you saw this scan uh I mean my jaw dropped I’m like whoa I was actually even in the clinic seeing patients and the Pet Scan technician called and said oh yeah there’s a big change I’m like how do you
Know we have to analyze it it’s like no you can see it on the screen so what did you think when Dr Rai shared the the scans with you it was surreal you can really see it you don’t have to be a doctor and understand what’s going on
There absolutely not even the red is decreasing that’s amazing Kathy Miller says she can see it in her husband too who slips up once in a while but hasn’t slipped further away he has trouble finding things I’ll send him into the kitchen to get something and he’s like
It’s not there I’m like yes it is I can see it but he can’t see it but if that’s the worst that’s nothing you’ll take it I’ll take it you feel hopeful about the future I do yes I learned that what I needed to do is accept that the Old Dan
Is gone and then start working on the new me which has a future Dr rai’s team told us there’s been no change in the ability of the three patients to do their daily activities since the ultrasound treatments ended in July now that Dr Rai has shown Focus ult ultrasound can clear
Beta ameloid plaques faster he has FDA approval to use ultrasound to try and restore brain cell function lost to alzheimer’s what’s the result of breaking up all those plaques to the damage that’s already been done to the brain we don’t know if it’s going to reverse damage to the brain because
Alzheimer’s the underlying cause is still occurring so we have another study that we’re looking at with ultrasound first clear the plaques then the Delver ultrasound in a different dose to see now if we can reverse it or boost the brain more for people with Alzheimer’s when we come back we’ll show
You Dr rai’s new way to use ultrasound to reset the brain and help people suffering from drug addiction the human brain contains a 100 billion neurons that’s as many cells as there are Stars across the Milky Way Dr oi Rai has spent 25 years exploring this Frontier of medicine the surgical
Techniques and therapies he pioneered are in use around the world Dr Rai allowed us to see his latest research over the last year at the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute in Morgantown West Virginia it includes revolutionary treatments for a brain disease suffered by 24 million Americans addiction the results so far have been lifechanging
For the people we met once trapped by drugs looking back I didn’t have a chance what do you mean you didn’t have a chance I couldn’t do anything without having that drug um in my system Jared Buckhalter is the son of a coal miner at 6’3 he was a high school
Football standout who dreamed of playing wide receiver at Penn State but after a shoulder injury he got hooked on painkillers the very first time that I that I took that first pill um I I knew that I wanted that feeling for the rest of my life what dides it feel like it’s
Just pure Euphoria he took us to where he said he often went to buy drugs including heroin everybody in morgant toown knows to to come here it’s probably 17 18 years old you know just a kid Buck halter still looks like an athlete it’s hard to imagine he was an
Addict for more than 15 years he told us he does not remember how many times he overdosed and that he couldn’t stay clean for more than 4 days at a time I didn’t know where I was going to sleep some nights you know my family didn’t
Want me around anymore um I just I did so many things to hurt them that you know it was just too much for them to deal with four years ago a psychologist who’ worked with buck halter introduced him to Dr oi rosai who was gearing up to
Perform a new kind of brain surgery to treat severe addiction our protocol was people that have failed everything once you’ve tried everything everything residential programs multiple failures detox multiple times outpatient inpatient multiple overdoses I think he classified it as a endstage drug user I mean end stage makes you think that this
Is the end of your life correct um and here and that at the age of 34 um it was crazy bring elod in Dr Rai thought he might be able to adapt technology he helped develop years earlier to treat Parkinson’s disease to treat people with severe addiction we’ve been able to map
Out with Neuroscience Imaging there’s a specific part of the brain that is electrically and chemically malfunctioning that is associated with addiction so it’s not just willpower it’s what’s happening in the brain it’s a brain disease it’s an electrical and chemical abnormality in the brain that occurs over time with recurrent use of
Drugs and this can be any substance as alcohol can be opioids amphetamines cocaine and they all are involving the same part of the brain and so your idea was what with the implant Parkinson’s we implant that in the movement part of the brain that is electrically malfunctioning causing shaking in this
Case we’re going into behavioral regulation anxiety and craving parts of the brain Dr Rai has seen the impact of addiction in his community the problem is so severe in Morgantown a vending machine dispenses the overdose antidote Narcan for free you got your baselin the National Institute on drug abuse agreed
To support Dr rai’s attempt to fight addiction with a brain implant in 2019 the FDA gave him a green light to attempt the groundbreaking surgery cover pleas that is Jared Buck halter he agreed to be the first addiction patient in the US to get the implant Dr rai’s
Team interviewed him the day before the surgery the best outcome uh possible would be you know just to cut the Cravings out and and make me felt a little bit better if you know if those couple things happen you know uh that’s all I could possibly ask
For at that time I was so desperate for a better life um that I was willing to do just about anything and I signed up to do it I think some people might look at this and think an electronic implant in the brain sounds a little creepy
People maybe 50 years ago they say a implant in the heart sounds creepy now it’s like normal 25 years ago people are saying what are you doing you’re putting an implant in the brain for Parkinson’s but now it is routine part of standard of care for advanced Parkinson’s this is video from the
7-hour procedure I’m you are surgery so new it didn’t have a name yet Dr Rai opened a nickel-sized hole in Buck Halter’s skull then he directed a thin wire with four electrodes deep inside jar are you okay all right Jared was awake during the surgery why was that
Necessary to map the brain we have tiny microphones the size of a hair we put inside the brain and they’re going slowly with micro robots they go at increments of a thousand of a millimeter very slow we drive them into the brain and we’re listening to the neurons
Talking to each other in addiction we want to find the area in the reward center so that confirms where we are in the brain once we listen and we say okay that’s the right sound then we put the final therapeutic pacemaker what does it sound like static electricity which may
Be electricity to you but it’s music to my ears music because Dr Rai says it’s a signal that he found the right spot in the brain for the implant once in place the wire was connected to a device placed below the collar bone okay the electrical pulses
It sends to the brain are intended to suppress Cravings Buck halter said it was painless post surgery the system is adjusted remotely with a tablet computer is needed when they turned the unit on it was an immediate change what was the change just felt better you know just
Felt like I did prior to ever using drugs but a little bit better and it was at that point that I knew that I was going to have a legitimate shot at doing well in all four patients with severe drug addiction had the implant surgery one had a minor relapse another
Dropped out of the trial completely but two have been drug-free since their operations including Jared Buck halter who’s been clean for 4 years if you hadn’t met Dr riah if you hadn’t gone through this implant do you think you’d be sitting here talking to me today you
May be talking to my parents you know those that have lost their their loved ones to a drug overdose um but you wouldn’t be talking to me there’s there’s no doubt about that ah beautiful beautiful the surgery was a success but opening someone’s skull is always risky
Dr Rai thought he could reach more patients quickly if he used ultrasound he was already using it to treat other brain disorders and was convinced focused ultrasound could Target the same area of the brain as the implant is this brain surgery without a knife it is indeed so this is there’s no skin
Cutting there’s no opening the skull so it is brain surgery without cutting the skin indeed now this is just the measuring part right Dr Rai explained how his team would be the first to treat addicts by aiming hundreds of beams of ultrasound to a precise Point deep
Inside the brain so the area that we’re treating is the reward center in the brain which is the nucleus AC comus which is right down at the base of this dark area and then we deliver ultrasound waves to that specific part of the brain and we watch how acutely on
The table your cravings and your anxiety changes and respond respon to Ultrasound how is the ultrasound making a change here ultrasound energy is changing the electrical and chemical Millie or activity in this structure in the brain involving addiction and Cravings just resetting them and giving them kind of a
Fresh start at this point it seems like the brain is being reset or rebooting of the brain and the Cravings are less they’re managed anxiety is better so now that allows them to interact with the therapist it’s very important to know that this is not a cure but an
Augmentation of the therapy by reducing the cravings and anxiety that’s so overwhelming that the therapist has difficulty working with the patient last February we watched Dr Rai used focused ultrasound to treat Dave Martin who told us he’s been surrounded by friends and family who use drugs his whole life when
Did you start using drugs um when I was seven years old seven yes I did drugs for 37 years what kind of drugs were you using anything I can get my hands on inside the MRI Martin was shown these images of drug use to stoke his Cravings
His legs were moving a lot and he very agitated a simultaneous brain scan allowed Dr Rai and his team to immediately spot the area in the nucleus accumbent that was most active I’d like to see the targets one more time 90 watts of ultrasound energy were beamed
At a Target the size of a gumdrop ready Sonic we go within minutes we noticed Martin’s foot that had been anxiously bouncing was still and he told rai’s team that those same images of drugs he was shown earlier were now not sparking the need for a fix heroin is going down
Meth is also going down marijuana’s down marijuana’s down good a lot actually good keep on sonicating the data proceed it was the best day of my life I didn’t experience the same effect as like the times before this you didn’t feel like I need that I
Want no I didn’t feel like I needed the The Urge or the desire to use wasn’t there anymore so within 15 to 20 minutes of treatment they craving and anxiety melts away and we’re seeing this pattern in multiple instances then they can walk away after this there’s get off the table and go
Home and how long does this entire procedure one hour one hour 1 hour have you been around people still using drugs yes yes unfortunately I have um and what happened it didn’t even trigger me uh I used to use in inven usly with needles
And it was a a little while ago not too far back but um this one individual was trying to hit theirself and they couldn’t hit and they asked me can can you hit me do you actually put drugs I actually stuck them drew the blood back
You know now before when I drew the blood back it would like make make me sweat because I couldn’t wait to hit myself but this time it was just like God I hope they don’t OD and I kill them here you know but I didn’t have any urges or desire or anything
So Dr rai’s team told us Dave Martin did admit to taking one painkilling pill at a party in December still 10 of the 15 patients in the ultrasound clinical trials have remained completely drug-free Dr Oli Rai is trying the same ultrasound therapy on 45 more addiction patients and is already thinking about expanding
The use of ultrasound to help people with other brain disorders I want to get a Vass here including post-traumatic stress disorder and obesity let’s do it again this is serious business research never been done before we have to learn more we have to replicate our findings is there any risk at running towards
Something quickly there’s always risk but you cannot advance and make discoveries without risk but we need to push forward and take the risk because people with addiction and Alzheimer’s is not going away it’s here so why wait 10 20 years do it now
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