Combating Alzheimer’s

Elizabeth Boyd has always been an advocate for a healthy mind, body and family. She earned a business degree in the 1940s before many women even considered entering the workforce. She stayed physically fit, had a happy marriage for 62 years and made sure her two daughters attended both college and church.

Now, 90-year-old Boyd still has remarkable physical health, facing only high blood pressure and a slight twinge of arthritis. She reads her Bible every day, gets her hair fixed once a week and calls her daughters regularly to check up on them. Boyd also can’t remember if she showered or took her medication this morning. She has forgotten how to operate an oven or a television, and she is convinced her granddaughter is stealing her clothes.

Boyd was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007, and her symptoms are now so severe that her family has put her in an assisted living home.

“When your mother can forget your name and who you are, it’s hard,” said Connie Beatty, Boyd’s younger daughter. “I go home and cry because it tears me up.”

Alzheimer’s disease is a devastating and fatal form of dementia that, according to the Center for Disease Control, affects about 5 million adults in the U.S. It destroys its victim’s brain function and causes memory loss, personality changes and inability to function independently. Currently, there is no cure.

Andrew Lampkins, a professor in the Samford chemistry department, has been researching treatments for Alzheimer’s disease for five years. With the help of undergraduate students, Lampkins is designing chemicals that could potentially slow or even stop the spread of the disease.

“Alzheimer’s disease, in my mind, is one of the most crippling conditions in the United States,” Lampkins said. “There is a major medical and economic burden that this disease state imparts on us.”

Lampkins has focused his efforts on creating a drug to fight amyloid plaques, an enzyme that he described as “gunk” that builds up and obstructs the brain’s work.

“In patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the balance is disrupted,” he said. “It causes all those problems. What we’re hoping to do is slow down that process, restore it back to its normal level.”

Lampkins has created about a dozen potential drugs so far, which are being tested by Erika Cretton-Scott, a professor at the McWhorter School of Pharmacy. Although none of the chemicals have responded successfully to testing yet, both professors know this is part of the process of research.

“Research by its very definition is frustrating,” Lampkins said. “We’ll get to a dead end or we’ll get to a reaction that just doesn’t work, so we have to go back.”

“It’s tedious to get to the answers that we want,” agreed Cretton-Scott. “With any chemical compound, when you bridge chemistry and biology together, some things usually don’t work.”

Lampkins is confident his lab will soon discover the right formula, creating a chemical that can be developed into a cure or prevention for Alzheimer’s disease. For patients like Boyd, however, any such breakthrough will come too late. Her illness has advanced to Stage II, and her memories and comprehension are already too destroyed for any medication to bring them back.

“The hardest thing is being forgotten – going in and they don’t know you anymore,” Beatty said. “Every day you’re saying goodbye to the mental faculties of that person who loved you and took care of you.”

November is National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month and National Caregiver Month. To learn more visit alz.org.