-It is time now for this month's "Your Brain Health Matters."

Right now, there is no cure for Alzheimer's disease.

But pushing back the impact of it, even just a few years, can be really important for patients and their families.

Nevada Week recently visited the UNLV Department of Brain Health, where Dr.

Jeff Cummings explained how a new category of drugs known as anti-amyloid therapies can delay some of the more severe symptoms of Alzheimer's.

And the three approved drugs that you talked about, those drugs do what?

(Dr.

Jeff Cummings) They use the body's own immune system to remove the abnormal protein that accumulates in the brain in Alzheimer's disease.

So there's a cell that keeps germs out of your brain, and we trick that cell into thinking that the protein of Alzheimer's disease is foreign and should be removed.

-So to be clear, they are not cures, those drugs, but they are preventing or they are slowing?

How would you describe what they do?

-They slow the disease by about 30%.

So what we can see is that at the end of an 18-month trial, the patients who received treatment were five months better off than the patients who did not receive treatment.

So if you translate that into several years of therapy, you have more time to drive, more time to be autonomous, more time with the grandchildren, more time to travel, to do all the things you want to do when you're in your later years of life.

-When someone is found to have Alzheimer's, what are the treatments available to them, and what does that process look like?

-When someone is confirmed to have Alzheimer's disease, and you know that we have new blood tests that help us with that process, then one would enter the discussion based on how severe the symptoms were.

If the patients had very mild symptoms, they would-- they would be at least offered these new types of drugs that remove the protein from the brain.

If they were in more advanced stages of the disease, we have drugs, pills, that improve temporarily the memory of the individual involved.

-What side effects exist with these treatments?

-There's one type of side effect that we are particularly concerned with, and that has to do with leaky blood vessels.

As we remove the protein from the brain with the drug, we also remove that same protein from the blood vessel, and that allows it to leak for the first few months after we introduce the drug.

So a few patients develop swelling of the brain and sometimes even blood in the brain through this kind of vessel opening.

And that's why we do several MRIs early in the course, because those vessels heal and therefore that process, that side effect, is limited to the early phase of initiating the therapy.

We can manage that successfully in almost all patients, but only if we monitor it and manage it appropriately.

-Dr.

Cummings says one of the biggest barriers to patients getting these drugs is a lack of knowledge by physicians and also how complex it can be to administer them.

Trials are already underway on the next generation of these drugs, and they aim to cut down the amount of time a patient is required to take them and reduce side effects.