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Reddit community helps find missing mom with Alzheimer’s

April 24, 2014

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A Reddit user posted a plea on the link-sharing site Tuesday after his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, disappeared from the family’s New York City apartment.

The user, joshgoldberg89, provided photos and a description of his mother, May, and encouraged users to share the information and keep an eye out for her.

Just hours later, another user, geryorama, posted that he had spotted May and had taken her to a safe place and alerted authorities.

“I approached her, asked for her name, told her that her family is looking for her, and took her to Hyatt Hotel lobby to contact the police,” he wrote.

Josh posted a heartfelt thank you to the Reddit community for helping to find his mother: “The outpouring of support has been completely overwhelming. My family and I send a HUGE thank you to the entire Reddit community. You are amazing.”

More than five million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jean-Pierre Roussarie, a senior research associate at the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research at Rockefeller University, is working to find a cure.

“The research that we’re doing at Rockefeller University with the tremendous support of the Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation is definitely providing the community with amazing hope for new treatments,” Roussarie told FoxNews.com. “We’re envisioning the disease in this completely new way. We think that this new strategy, trying to understand what is particular to vulnerable regions of the brain, has the potential of yielding new therapies in the not so distant future.”

Roussarie works in the lab of Nobel prize-winning scientist Dr. Paul Greengard. Their research is focused on trying to understand why only certain parts of the brain degenerate early on in the disease.

“At the very beginning of the disease, the most prominent symptoms that you can observe are really impairment of new memory formation,” Roussarie said. “We’re trying to understand what these regions involved in new memory foundation have in particular, what proteins are inside them that are not present in more resistant regions of the brain, and the goal of this research is to locate, pinpoint proteins that we can target with drugs in order to prevent vulnerable regions of the brain from degenerating.”

Find out more about the lab’s research here.

Source: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/04/24/reddit-helps-find-missing-mom-with-alzheimer

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