Scientists Find New Target For Alzhiemer's

GarryFre writes "Neurological researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found a new therapeutic target that can potentially lead to a new way to prevent the progression of Alzheimer's disease. The target called neutral sphingomyelinase (N-SMase) is a protein which, when activated, can cause a chain of reactions in the cell leading to neuronal death and memory loss. Already a substance has been found that shows some promise in halting the progression of the disease."

Comments

Re:Hope for Pratchett?

[Defenestrar]

Pratchett has early onset which tends to be faster paced.

Re:I hope

[Defenestrar]

The type of Alzheimer's they talk about here is caused by ß-amyloidosis which is a mis folded protein disease (prion - like mad cow). What happens is that normal secondary protein structure is converted from an form to ß causing conformational changes in the protein's tertiary structure leading to insolubility (this insoluble protein is now called an amyloid). Supposedly the Rice researchers have found a way to prevent the ß-amyloid deposits from causing cell damage, however unless it's 100% efficient it won't be enough because misfolded proteins are "contagious" - that is they cause other normally folded protiens to convert to the insoluble misfolded amyloid which will proceed with exponential growth. Eventually you'll have every one of those proteins in the ß configuration.

Nice article

[mesri]

Pretty good article (the original in J. Neurosci). Alzheimer's has long been believed to be caused by aggregates of amyloid-beta protein, but exactly how they kill neurons (and in what stage of aggregation) has been pretty controversial. They showed a pathway from the amyloid-beta through this N-SMase to neuron death in small assemblies _and_ in larger aggregates, which should make everybody happy (or maybe no one). The important caveat though is that this was in vitro testing, and everything to do with studying Alzheimer's has been confounded by the subtle differences between in vivo and in vitro.

Re:So messed up

[Digicrat]

90-95% of the time that's true, but alzheimer's isn't always just an old timers disease. It's called early-onset Alzeimer's disease

Re:Scary, scary illness FWIW

[HiThere]

My father died of complications of Altzheimers.

It was hell on my mother for years, but *he* seemed to enjoy it.

(The complication was that a year or two after he had been "hospitalized" and gotten to the point where they had to strap him into the bed, one night he stood up in bed and fell out of it, landing on his head and breaking his neck.)

Altzheimers is hard on those close to the patient, not so much on the patient. But this *does* depend on the form. Some people stay aware that they are losing their minds. My father never seemed to notice. I still remember him trying to seduce my wife while both my mother and I were in the room, he was confined to a bed. He was stroking her arm and telling her he didn't have any family...