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Alzheimer's Transmission Pathway Discovered
smitty777 writes "Two separate studies by the Taub Institute and Harvard have discovered the pathway used by Alzheimer's Disease to spread through the brain. The studies indicate it's not a virus, but a distorted protein called Tau which moves from cell to cell. Further, the discovery 'may now offer scientists a way to move forward and develop a way to block tau's spread in Alzheimer's patients, said Karen Duff, a researcher at Columbia's Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's disease and co-author of one study published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. "It's enlightening for us because it now provides a whole other area for potential therapeutic impact," said Duff. "It's possible that you can identify the disease and intervene (with potential tau-blocking drugs) before the dementia actually sets in."'"
After watching my dad ravaged body (by bone cancer) and mind (by Alzheimer's), anything that may some day lead to prevention is great news.
Perhaps this is what makes soylent green so delicious? If so, then I consider it an acceptable risk.
It was done at a University by students who probably weren't paid. It wasn't done by a pharmaceutical lab. Remember that when the drug companies try to justify charging your parents $2000 for a one month supply of Alzheimer medication.
They spend more on advertising then R&D.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002355/
For some fun and tasty reading.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I talked with the researchers involved with Folding@Home, and they told me that indeed, processing power is at least partly used to research Tau protein misfolding.
So, if you want to do something good for your future (since there is a good chance you'll be hit by Alzheimer's if you live long enough), I suggest contributing your CPU and graphics cards cycles to Folding@Home.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I've never heard of anything to suggest that Alzheimers can be "caught." A seminar I saw a few years ago on tau suggested that in order to form these aggregates of tau, you need to have a mutated form of it: normal tau does not start clumping up and killing brain cells (not entirely sure I'm remembering that correctly). It's only transmissible between cells which have the same mutant form of the protein. I don't know, maybe it's possible that material from alzheimers patients could make the disease appear sooner in people with the mutant form who would probably develop symptoms later.
The prion protein that is at the heart of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, on the other hand, that appears to be the normal protein misfolding. The diseased proteins seem to convince normal proteins to misfold.
So, as I understand it, the hypothesis is that if you were to inject material from an alzheimer's patient's brain into your brain, for example, the alzheimer's Tau would not cause your tau to start clumping up and would not cause the disease. If you injected brain material from someone suffering from spongiform encephalitis though, the proteins in your brain WOULD be coaxed to start clumping up, causing the disease.
Let's not test those hypotheses though...
We've known about tau protein's involvement in Alzheimers for decades. Specifically, we've known that the protein forms tangles which crush brain cells. That part is beyond old news. What seems to happen is that the tau protein "unzips" from its proper location, resulting in brain cells registering that there is insufficient tau protein in locations where it should be, in turn resulting in a loop that will kill everything in the area.
What is NOT known is why it unzips. My father's work in the late 80s, early 90s, showed that aluminum toxicity can cause the unzipping process. Later studies have shown that this is not the only pathway, but that there is usually something encased in the tau protein.
This has led to me speculating that this may have once been a feature, not a bug, that in early life this might have been an environmental detox mechanism (bind toxic chemicals in the area up in protein which is then ejected). This is based on the fact that the brain is unique amongst cells utilizing tau protein in that it has nowhere to eject bound-up toxins and that you don't see these kinds of tangles forming in other contexts where tau protein exists. It would also explain why Alzheimer's looks like it could be virally caused as it would end up with the same look and feel at the neurological level. On the one hand, I've read the papers, I've been involved in the research, I understand the science extremely well. On the other hand, neuroscience is a jealous discipline - even biochemists have a very tough time getting a hearing and I've far less standing than that in the biological sciences - and thus I do not expect this speculation to get looked at. (And, no, this speculation isn't Wikipedia-based. The original thoughts were written up when Gopher was the protocol of choice and really is based on hard, raw data collected in the field. I was, after all, involved in collecting it.) Nonetheless, this finding convinces me that I will prove to have been far closer to the actual mechanism than most of the recognized theories to date. (Yes I'm an old, arrogant, snobbish fart. Now fetch me a lawn so you can gerroff it!)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)