Bill Gates shares hope for Alzheimer’s progress after father’s battle

Bill Gates talks about his personal experience with Alzheimer’s – And his hope of progress in the fight against illness.

In a test published this week on his blog on Gatesnotes.com, the co-founder of Microsoft and Tech Billionaire, 69, thought about the difficulty of spending another Fathers Day without his father, Bill Gates Sr.

The seniors died in 2020 at the age of 94 after fighting Alzheimer’s disease.

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“It was a brutal experience, looking at my brilliant father and loving to go down and disappear,” said Gates in the blog post.

Today, motivated by his own experience with common dementia, Gates – who is president of the Gates Foundation – is committed to working on a remedy against common dementia, which currently affects more than seven million Americans, or one in nine over 65 years.

In his blog, Gates expressed his optimism about “massive progress” made in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia.

Last year, Gates said that he had visited the medical school of the University of Indiana in Indianapolis to visit the laboratories where the teams did research on the Biomarkers of Alzheimer.

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“I also had the opportunity to look under the hood of new automated machines that will soon perform diagnostics in the world,” he wrote. “It is an exciting period in a difficult space.”

According to Gates, one of the greatest breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s research, which detects the report of amyloid plates in the brain. (Amyloid plates, protein tufts that accumulate in the brain, are one of the characteristics of Alzheimer.)

“I am optimistic that these tests change the situation,” wrote Gates.

Last month, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first blood test For patients aged 55 and over, as Fox News Digital reported it at the time.

“A simple, precise and easy -to -go blood test could one day make routine screening possible.”

Traditionally, noted Gates, the main path to the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was either a PET (medical imaging), or a vertebral tap (lumbar puncture), which were generally only carried out when the symptoms emerged.

Hope is that blood tests could do a better job to catch the disease early, the decline begins.

“We now know that the disease begins 15 at 20 years before we start to see signs,” wrote Gates.

“A simple, precise and easy to manage blood test Could one day make routine screening possible, identifying patients well before feeling a cognitive decline, “he said.

Gates said that he is often asked: “What is the point of diagnosing if I can’t do anything about it?”

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To this end, he expressed his optimism for the future of Alzheimer’s treatments, noting that two drugs – Lecanemab (Leqmbi) and Donanemab (Kisunla) – obtained approval from the FDA.

“The two have proven to have modestly slowed down the progression of the disease, but what really fascinates me is their potential when associated with an early diagnosis,” noted Gates.

He said he also hoped that blood tests will help speed up the patient’s registration process in clinical trials for new Alzheimer’s drugs.

To do this, Gates calls for an increase Research financingwhich often comes from federal subsidies.

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“It’s time to spend More money on researchNo less, “he wrote, also declaring that” the quest to stop Alzheimer’s disease has never had more momentum “.

“There is still a lot of work to do – like deepening our understanding of the pathology of the disease and developing even better diagnoses,” continued Gates.

“I am blown away by how much we have learned about Alzheimer’s disease in the past two years.”

Gates stressed that when his father had Alzheimer’s disease, it was considered a “death sentence”, but it is starting to change.

“I am blown away by how much we have learned on Alzheimer’s in the past two years,” he wrote.

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“I can’t help but be filled with a feeling of hope when I think of all the progress made on Alzheimer’s disease, even with so many challenges that occur in the world. We are closer to a world where no one has to look at someone they like to suffer from this horrible disease.”