The study for the first time can quantify the speed of different processes that lead to Alzheimer’s disease – in a very different way than previously thought.
Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease
It was found that instead of starting from a single point in the brain and initiating a chain reaction that leads to the death of brain cells, Alzheimer’s disease reaches different regions of the brain early.
The study team used post-mortem brain samples from Alzheimer’s patients, as well as PET scans from living patients (mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s disease), to track the tau aggregation.
Using mathematical models, the team observed that the mechanism controlling the rate of progression in Alzheimer’s disease is the replication of aggregates in individual regions of the brain, and not the spread of aggregates from one region to another.
Novel Finding
“The thinking had been that Alzheimer’s develops in a way that’s similar to many cancers: the aggregates form in one region and then spread through the brain. But instead, we found that when Alzheimer’s starts there are already aggregates in multiple regions of the brain, and so trying to stop the spread between regions will do little to slow the disease,” says Dr. Georg Meisl from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the paper’s first author.
“This research shows the value of working with human data instead of imperfect animal models”. “The key discovery is that stopping the replication of aggregates rather than their propagation is going to be more effective at the stages of the disease that we studied,” says co-senior author Professor Tuomas Knowles, also from the Department of Chemistry.
The study thus opens up new ways of understanding the progress of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases that may help formulate novel treatments in the future.
Source: Medindia
