Yesterday several publications including the Daily Mail reported on a new and potentially exciting avenue for the treatment of Alzheimer’s. Called temporal interference brain stimulation, electrodes are attached to the scalp and then two non-invasive and harmless high frequency electric currents are transmitted into the brain. Both currents are at slightly different frequencies and when they coincide a third, but low frequency wave is created.
If the trial in 24 patients, held over a 2 week period in January next year, is successful, scientists, from Imperial College London and the Dementia Research Institute, are hopeful that the merging of the currents into a low frequency one will represent a large and significant step forward in the treatment of dementia.
The frequency will be triggered in an area deep in the brain responsible for new memories, called the
The trial is hoping to find that it revives the mitochondria (which becomes damaged in a person with Alzheimer’s) in the hippocampus part of the brain, which is responsible for new memories.
This promising study has received a $1.5 million grant from Bill Gates and other US philanthropists.