Published: April 22, 2011
istockphoto
cientists at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are developing a technique based on a new discovery which could pave the way towards detecting Alzheimer’s disease in its earliest stages – and could help to develop urgently-needed treatments.
The technique uses the ratio of detected fluorescence signals to indicate that clusters of peptide associated with the disease are beginning to gather and to have an impact on the brain.
Current techniques are not able to see the peptide joining together until more advanced stages but a research paper from Strathclyde describes an approach which could not only give indications of the condition far sooner than is currently possible but could also screen patients without the need for needles or wires.
Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, currently affects around 450,000 people in the UK alone and currently has no cure. [continue reading…]
Published: March 29, 2011
Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have lower glucose utilization in the brain than those with normal cognitive function, and that those decreased levels may be detectable approximately 20 years prior to the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. This new finding could lead to the development of novel therapies to prevent the eventual onset of Alzheimer’s. The study is published online in the journal Translational Neuroscience. [continue reading…]
Published: March 23, 2011
Photo credit: Sarah Day
he human brain loses 5 to 10% of its weight between the ages of 20 and 90 years old. While some cells are lost, the brain is equipped with two compensatory mechanisms: plasticity and redundancy. Based on the results of her most recent clinical study published today in the online version of Brain: A Journal of Neurology, Dr. Sylvie Belleville, PhD in neuropsychology, the principal author of this study and Director of Research at the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM), which is affiliated with the Université de Montréal, has found that for elderly subjects at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, hope may lie in brain plasticity.
[continue reading…]
An unexpected discovery points to the liver, not the brain, as the source of plaque associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Greg Sutcliffe, is a professor and lead researcher of the study done at Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. Sutcliffe said a protein substance “born in the liver” travels through the blood stream and deposits plaque commonly associated with Alzheimer’s in the brain. “The disease Alzheimer’s pathogenic origins are in the liver rather than in the brain,” said Sutcliffe.
Because medicine travels into the liver easier than it does the brain, Sutcliffe said, this discovery could mean that treating the devastating disease may be as easy as taking a few pills .“It’s a big step toward directing attention toward what needs to be accomplished.” Sutcliffe said the next steps are to work with a drug company to do human clinical trials that target the production of the Alzheimer’s plaque that originating in the liver. The research, done on mice, also found three genes that seemed to protect against Alzheimer’s-linked plaque.
The Study was published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
