Alzheimer's Breakthrough Study

[babylonsister]

Revealed: how Alzheimer's infects the brain

Breakthrough may lead to new treatments for senile dementia

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Monday, 8 June 2009


A scientific breakthrough in the understanding of how Alzheimer's disease may spread across the brain of elderly patients might lead to novel ways of treating senile dementia, scientists have announced.

A study has discovered that a key brain protein linked with Alzheimer's disease has infectious properties that allow defects in the protein to be transmitted through the brain and so leads to debilitating neuro-degeneration.

It is the first time that scientists have detected infectious properties in the so-called tau protein which causes aggregates of particles known as "neurofibrillary tangles" to build up inside the brain cells of Alzheimer's patients. The tangles lead to the disease's symptoms.

But the researchers emphasised that the discovery does not mean that the disease itself is infectious, only that the tau protein seen in Alzheimer's disease is able to convert otherwise healthy brain proteins into the defective form associated with the disease.

Alzheimer's disease is one of the fastest growing and most costly medical conditions. About 700,000 people in the UK have some form of dementia and this will grow to about 940,000 by 2015, rising to more than 1.7 million by 2051 as a result of the demographic time bomb of an ageing population.

Medical researchers believe that the latest findings – which have so far been shown in laboratory mice rather than human patients – could open up new ways of treating Alzheimer's disease by developing drugs that block the tau's infectious properties.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-how-alzheimers-infects-the-brain-1699214.html