Magnetic brain stimulation shows promise for Alzheimer's

Stimulating the brain with magnetic pulses might help people with Alzheimer's disease improve their use of language, new research suggests. However, this treatment is still highly experimental and has been tested on very few people.

What do we know already?

Alzheimer's disease affects more than 400,000 people in the UK. Over time, it damages people's ability to think, remember things, and use language. There are several drugs that can slow down the progress of the disease, but there's no cure, and most treatments have fairly small effects. Alzheimer's charities stress the importance of practical support to help patients and carers cope, and to help people live independently for as long as possible.
In recent years, researchers have developed techniques that use magnetic pulses to influence the electrical activity in people's brains. The magnetic pulses travel through the skull, so there's no need for surgery.
Small-scale studies have looked at using magnetic stimulation for several conditions, including migraine, Parkinson's disease, and depression. A new study has now looked at magnetic stimulation as a treatment for people with Alzheimer's disease.

What does the new study say?

People who had magnetic stimulation showed a small, short-term improvement in their ability to use language.
For two weeks, half the people in the study had magnetic stimulation, and the other half had sham treatment with an inactive device. People had five sessions a week, each one lasting 25 minutes.
Over the two weeks, people who'd had magnetic stimulation improved their scores on a language test looking at sentence comprehension. The average starting score was 67, which increased to 77 after treatment. People who had sham stimulation scored an average of 66 points at the start of the study, and didn't improve over the two weeks.
It's worth noting that the people in the study took a whole battery of tests, looking at things like their mental state, their ability to name objects in a picture, a writing test, and a test looking at how well they performed their day-to-day activities. The sentence comprehension test was the only one where people showed an improvement.
After the first two weeks, both groups were given another two weeks of treatment, and this time everyone had real magnetic stimulation. The people who'd started with sham treatment caught up with the people who'd had real magnetic stimulation from the start, but there was no additional improvement among people who'd had the real treatment all along.
People continued getting higher scores in the language test in week 12 of the study, eight weeks after they'd finished treatment.

How reliable is the research?

The findings come from a small, preliminary study looking at just 10 people. While there seemed to be some improvement in language ability, there were no improvements in memory or in people's ability to make decisions or do everyday things. So, it's debatable just how much of a difference this treatment would make to people's day-to-day lives.

Where does the study come from?

The study was done in Italy and appeared in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, published by the BMJ Group.
Funding came from the Italian ministry of health and the Fatebenefratelli Association for Biomedical and Health Research.

What does this mean for me?

Alzheimer's is a serious illness, and it can make life very difficult for patients and their carers. It's natural to be hopeful about new treatments, but it's likely to be some time before researchers fully investigate magnetic stimulation and can say confidently whether it works.