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posted by janrinok on Monday January 08 2018, @09:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the every-step-we-take dept.

Alzheimer's protein may spread like an infection, human brain scans suggest

For the first time, scientists have produced evidence in living humans that the protein tau, which mars the brain in Alzheimer's disease, spreads from neuron to neuron. Although such movement wasn't directly observed, the finding may illuminate how neurodegeneration occurs in the devastating illness, and it could provide new ideas for stemming the brain damage that robs so many of memory and cognition.

[...] Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom combined two brain imaging techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, in 17 Alzheimer's patients to map both the buildup of tau and their brains' functional connectivity—that is, how spatially separated brain regions communicate with each other. Strikingly, they found the largest concentrations of the damaging tau protein in brain regions heavily wired to others, suggesting that tau may spread in a way analogous to influenza during an epidemic, when people with the most social contacts will be at greatest risk of catching the disease.

The research team says this pattern, described yesterday in Brain [open, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awx347] [DX], supports something known as the "transneuronal spread" hypothesis for Alzheimer's disease, which had previously been demonstrated in mice but not people. "We come down quite strongly in favor of the idea that tau is starting in one place and moving across neurons and synapses to other places," says clinical neurologist Thomas Cope, one of the study's authors. "That has never before been shown in humans. That's very exciting." Because the researchers looked at Alzheimer's patients with a range of disease severity, they were also able to demonstrate that, when tau accumulation was higher, brain regions were on the whole less connected. The strength of connections also decreased, and connections were increasingly random.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @09:43PM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 08 2018, @09:43PM (#619728)

    So is Alzheimer's a prion disease, like CJD?

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday January 08 2018, @09:48PM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday January 08 2018, @09:48PM (#619731) Journal

    Alzheimer's research is totally fucked. [soylentnews.org] Nobody is really sure what causes it or how to stop it.

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    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @01:28AM (#619808)

      oh fuck that is sad

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday January 08 2018, @10:18PM (5 children)

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Monday January 08 2018, @10:18PM (#619748) Journal

    From what little I know about it, it sounds like the amyloid conformation is a more stable one than the healthy structure, so while this probably isn't *transmissible* like vCJD or similar, once spontaneously established, it may have a similar progression...Christ, this is scary.

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    • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Tuesday January 09 2018, @02:32AM (3 children)

      by Hawkwind (3531) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @02:32AM (#619835)
      That's my understanding too. I heard it described this way on a recent episode of Fresh Air
       

      On why the onset of Alzheimer's is often described as an "attack"
       
      In Alzheimer's disease, there is a huge buildup of these sticky clumps of proteins that we call plaques and tangles. In an Alzheimer patient's brain, the brain is literally littered with plaques and tangles. ...
       
      The brain is essentially under attack by the presence of these toxic proteins. And we know that also once Alzheimer's starts, the immune system kicks in. When the immune system kicks in, you get ... inflammation, which actually makes the whole process much worse in many ways. And so the brain cells are sort of struggling to stay alive. The immune system, to begin with we think, tries to heal the brain — tries to remedy the situation and clear away the plaques and tangles. But for whatever reason it seems to fail.

       
      https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/01/02/575055148/neuroscientist-predicts-much-better-treatment-for-alzheimers-is-10-years-away [npr.org]
       
      Seems like the big thing here is they've confirmed the role of tau in the human process (and not mice).

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rylyeh on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:36AM

        by rylyeh (6726) <{kadath} {at} {gmail.com}> on Tuesday January 09 2018, @05:36AM (#619877)

        There is this: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/specks-brain-alzheimers-plaque-forming-protein [sciencenews.org] which provides some hope assuming it also translates to humans from mice.

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      • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:55PM (1 child)

        by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Tuesday January 09 2018, @08:55PM (#620208) Journal

        I have a hypothesis, and as someone who isn't formally educated in medicine, this may be way off...but...bear with it for a moment:

        Do you suppose that some combination of diet, environmental factors, and plain old aging is degrading the amount of energy total in the cells' mitochondria, and being stuck too long in low energy states makes it hard to maintain the less-energetically-favorable but normal state of brain structure? That is, since the amyloid is a lower-energy state, could circulation problems, bad nutrition, oxidative damage, etc possibly be making it more likely for proteins to collapse into the diseased forms? Something something, quantum, metastable, etc. I don't know, just spitballing here.

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        • (Score: 2) by Hawkwind on Wednesday January 10 2018, @03:01AM

          by Hawkwind (3531) on Wednesday January 10 2018, @03:01AM (#620320)

          Well, not my area, and the spit plus the something, but. Yeah, it seems like understanding is starting to come. We can stay tuned and see what comes next!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 09 2018, @06:53PM (#620147)

      brought to you by the social security administration. no checks for you fuckers!