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Sun, Oct 19

Alzheimer’s study explained by Duke expert

Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating illness that is quickly turning into a national health crisis—by 2050, almost two thirds of people age 85 or older are expected to have some form of the disease.

One real barrier to progress is the difficulty of testing treatments without using human subjects. But a new report reveals that this barrier may have been surmounted by replicating Alzheimer’s in a petri dish. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, doctors have been able to reproduce Alzheimer’s disease in a controlled environment for the first time.

Murali Doraiswamy, the author of The Alzheimer’s Action Plan and a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center, joins The Takeaway to explain.

Listen to the program.