A medication that stops Alzheimer's in its tracks?

Baxter BioScience's Gammagard halted the progression of Alzheimer's disease for as long as three years in a 16-patient trial. Results were presented at the Alzheimer's Association's annual meeting in Vancouver. The findings offer a “tantalizing” glimpse of the drug's potential, said William Thies, the association's chief medical and scientific officer.

A definitive study of 390 patients will be completed this year and released in early 2013, said Norman Relkin, the lead researcher, and the director of the Memory Disorders Program and a neurologist at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.