Kelowna's Okanagan Clinical Trials will be joining a study accross Canada to pinpoint and prevent the causes of Alzheimer's Disease.
Men and women ages 60 to 75 who have not yet exhibited any symptoms of the Disease are welcome to volunteer in the study, which will take place over the next five years.
The study will look for certain genes in its subjects that have been linked with the onset of Alzheimer's Disease. In particular, the accumulation of amyloid beta, which starts in the human brain in someone's thirties or forties, can ultimately lead to the disease if there is too much accumulation.
That being said, one of the experimental medications used in the upcoming study looks to prevent that over-accumulation from ever happening.
Dr. Kim Christie of Okanagan Clinical Trials says the first step towards treatment has always been diagnosis, which hasn't always been easy for patients.
"Alzheimer's in particular is very tricky to diagnose, but we're getting much better at it," says Christie. "We've got more tools at hand to better diagnose it now then when they did before, when someone may have just been considered senile, and nothing was diagnosed properly."
From 2004 to 2011, over 80,000 deaths in Canada were attributed to Alzheimer's Disease, and in 2016, it was reported that 564,000 Canadians were living with Alzheimer's or other dementia-related diseases.