Where do you go with Alzheimer’s disease? Robert Linton asks.

“You go to a nursing home and you go to your grave,” he says, answering his own question.

Linton, a former Brampton city councilor, wasn’t willing to take that route.

So when he was diagnosed with the ailment two years ago, he instantly chose a more hopeful one instead.

He traces a wire that runs under the skin up his neck and scalp from a three volt battery back buried near his left clavicle to a spaghetti sized electrode implanted four inches into his brain where the “super highway” of the organ’s memory circuits reside.

And there, firing at 130 pulses a second, that electrode may well be restoring the memory that the degenerative disease was stealing.

“It is quite clear now that the circuits in the brain that control memory can be accessed,” says Dr. Andres Lozano, a senior scientist in the division of brain imaging and behavior systems at the Toronto Western Hospital.

“It is (also) quite clear that one can use electricity to drive the activity of these circuits and one can modulate the activity of these circuits in the brain.”

Lozano’s small study, which appeared Wednesday in the journal Annals of Neurology, is the first to show that electrical stimulation of the deep brain can alter the memory loss that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease.

Known as deep brain stimulation, the process has been used some 80,000 times worldwide – with remarkable results – on people suffering from Parkinson’s disease and depression.

For the procedure, doctors drill a nickel sized hole in the top of the scull, and guide the electrode into the desired area of the brain, attaching it via the subcutaneous wire to the chest mounted power source.

Patients are awake during the procedure, answering questions and making movements so surgeons can ensure they are not harming vital brain functions as they maneuver the electrode into the depths of the brain.

But in 2004, when Lozano was using the procedure in an attempt to help a morbidly obese man curb his appetite, he discovered – quite by accident – that it may have another use.

The electrode was placed in an area known as the fornix, which is buried deep in the brain about four inches behind the bridge of the nose.

And when the fornix was fired up, the obesity patient was instantly transported back, 30 years, to a prom night, where the colors of his date’s dress and the scent of her corsage were as vivid as they were on that distant evening.

The activation of vivid memories, while pleasant, would have been little more than a scientific curiosity.

But Lozano found that by tuning the current down, the stimulated fornix would activate known memory circuits in more distant parts of the brain.

These circuits are inactivated in Alzheimer’s patients because other regions surrounding them have been damaged by the disease, Lozano says.

“In Alzheimers there are areas of the brain that are damaged and areas of the brain that are less damaged,” he says.

“But the areas that are less damaged depend on inputs from these damaged areas.”

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Lozano’s study, which appears today in the journal Annals of Neurology, showed that turning on the fornix restored the healthy circuitry by circumventing the damaged portions.

“These areas that are innocent bystanders that are missing the inputs as a consequence of the Alzheimer’s disease are still able to be mobilized and engaged,” he says.

“We can turn these areas back online with electro-stimulation and we think this is going to have important behavioral consequences in the patients.”

Linton, the father of two grown boys, was one of six patients involved in this initial study of the process, which was conducted mainly to assess the safety of the procedure.

Yet measured by a standard memory capacity test, known as MMNE, all the patients did better than would have been otherwise expected.

On the MMNE scale, where “normal” is 30, Alzheimer’s patients typically lose three points a year.

“Indeed the year before their operation, these patients lost on average 3.3 points,” Lozano says.

“After the operation they only declined by 0.8 points…so we think this might be significant.”

Indeed, Linton himself actually improved on the test scores as did one other, while a third remained at the same score.

And in all the patients, brain scans showed that withering memory circuits, located largely in the temporal and parietal lobes, were being reanimated and were again taking up the glucose that feeds brain activity.

“In all of the patients we were able to prove that by stimulating them in this one spot we were able to activate, not only that spot but in the entire circuit of memory in these patients,” Lozano says.

“After one year one can get these areas of the brain that were previously dysfunctional to one again use up glucose.”

This renewed glucose uptake is one of the most important findings of the paper says.