Elevated cerebrospinal fluid pressure in patients with Alzheimers disease.docVIP

Cerebrospinal Fluid Research BioMedCentral Research Open Access Elevated cerebrospinal fluid pressure in patients with Alzheimers disease Gerald Silverberg*1, Martha Mayo2, Thomas Saul3, Jere Fellmann4 and Dawn McGuire5 Address: 1Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA 94305, USA, 2Genitope Corp, 525 Penobscot Drive, Redwood City, CA,94063, USA, 3Turning Point Engineering, PO box 372 Moss Beach CA, 94038, USA, 4Acologix Inc, 3960 Point Eden Way, Hayward, CA 94545, USA and 5Avigen Inc, 1301 Harbor Bay Parkway, Alameda CA 94502, USA Email: Gerald Silverberg* - geralds@; Martha Mayo - mmayo@; Thomas Saul - tsaul@; Jere Fellmann - jere.fellmann@; Dawn McGuire - dmcguire@ * Corresponding author Published: 31 May 2006 Received: 20 January 2006 Accepted: 31 May 2006 Cerebrospinal Fluid Research 2006, 3:7 doi:10.1186/17 43-8454-3-7 This article is available from: /content/3/1/7 ? 2006 Silverberg et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Abnormalities in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) production and turnover, seen in normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) and in Alzheimers disease (AD), may be an important cause of amyloid retention in the brain and may relate the two diseases. There is a high incidence of AD pathology in patients being shunted for NPH, the AD-NPH syndrome. We now report elevated CSF pressure (CSFP), consistent with very early hydrocephalus, in a subset of AD patients enrolled in a clinical trial of chronic low-flow CSF drainage. Our objective was to determine the frequency of elevated CSFP in subjects meeting National Institutes of Neurological and Communicative Diseases and Stroke – Alzheimers Disease and Related