There are many mysteries when it comes to understanding Alzheimers disease, with one of the biggest questions centering on how the memory-robbing disease progresses.
Decades ago, researchers discovered that the damage starts in the same part of the brain in all patients and systematically moves on to affect nearby regions. It wasnt clear, however, why this progression occurred. One intriguing theory was that the pathology “spreads” between neurons. But for years there wasnt a good way of testing the hypothesis.
Now, two new studies conducted in mice, one published in PLoS ONE and the other in press at Neuron, offer evidence that the damage – specifically the misfolding of a protein called tau – is likely passed from one neuron to another.
The exact mechanism isnt clear, but the researchers believe that somehow a flawed “template” for how tau should be folded gets released by one neuron and picked up by the next one, which then starts misfolding tau based on that new template, says Bradley Hyman, a Harvard neurology professor who is an author of the upcoming Neuron study.
Now, researchers can start figuring out how the errant message gets transmitted and picked up. Interrupting any step of this process could “plausibly” interrupt the progression of the disease, Hyman tells the Health Blog.
The papers have garnered a lot of interest. But some experts urge caution in interpreting the results.
The research “proposes a certain mechanism for tau spreading but that mechanism is unproven at this point, William Thies, chief medical and scientific officer of the Alzheimer’s Association, tells the Health Blog.
Theres a lot of work that needs to be done to clarify whether this is real as well as how the findings could be used to inform therapy, says Thies.
Image: iStockphoto
from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wsj/health/feed/~3/7xS5mN2BVnU/
