What is your doctor doing with this discovery?
What is your doctor doing to prevent your 33% dementia chance post-stroke from an Australian study? ANYTHING AT ALL? Or is your doctor expecting you to figure this out on your own?
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=155778&CultureCode=en
People with Alzheimer’s disease have fat deposits in the brain. For
the first time since the disease was described 109 years ago,
researchers affiliated with the University of Montreal Hospital Research
Centre (CRCHUM) have discovered accumulations of fat droplets in the
brain of patients who died from the disease and have identified the
nature of the fat.
This breakthrough, published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell,
opens up a new avenue in the search for a medication to cure or slow the
progression of Alzheimer’s disease. "We found fatty acid deposits in
the brain of patients who died from the disease and in mice that were
genetically modified to develop Alzheimer’s disease. Our experiments
suggest that these abnormal fat deposits could be a trigger for the
disease", said Karl Fernandes, a researcher at the CRCHUM and a
professor at University of Montreal.
Over 47.5 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s disease or some
other type of dementia, according to the World Health Organization.
Despite decades of research, the only medications currently available
treat the symptoms alone.
This study highlights what might prove to be a missing link in the
field. Researchers initially tried to understand why the brain’s stem
cells, which normally help repair brain damage, are unresponsive in
Alzheimer’s disease. Doctoral student Laura Hamilton was astonished to
find fat droplets near the stem cells, on the inner surface of the brain
in mice predisposed to develop the disease. "We realized that Dr. Alois
Alzheimer himself had noted the presence of lipid accumulations in
patients’ brains after their death when he first described the disease
in 1906. But this observation was dismissed and largely forgotten due to
the complexity of lipid biochemistry", said Laura Hamilton.
The researchers examined the brains of nine patients who died from
Alzheimer’s disease and found significantly more fat droplets compared
with five healthy brains. A team of chemists from University of Montreal
led by Pierre Chaurand then used an advanced mass spectrometry
technique to identify these fat deposits as triglycerides enriched with
specific fatty acids, which can also be found in animal fats and
vegetable oils.
"We discovered that these fatty acids are produced by the brain, that
they build up slowly with normal aging, but that the process is
accelerated significantly in the presence of genes that predispose to
Alzheimer’s disease", explained Karl Fernandes. In mice predisposed to
the disease, we showed that these fatty acids accumulate very early on,
at two months of age, which corresponds to the early twenties in humans.
Therefore, we think that the build-up of fatty acids is not a
consequence but rather a cause or accelerator of the disease."
Fortunately, there are pharmacological inhibitors of the enzyme that
produces these fatty acids. These molecules, which are currently being
tested for metabolic diseases such as obesity, could be effective in
treating Alzheimer’s disease. "We succeeded in preventing these fatty
acids from building up in the brains of mice predisposed to the disease.
The impact of this treatment on all the aspects of the disease is not
yet known, but it significantly increased stem cell activity," explained
Karl Fernandes. "This is very promising because stem cells play an
important role in learning, memory and regeneration."
This discovery lends support to the argument that Alzheimer’s disease
is a metabolic brain disease, rather like obesity or diabetes are
peripheral metabolic diseases. Karl Fernandes’ team is continuing its
experiments to verify whether this new approach can prevent or delay the
problems with memory, learning and depression associated with the
disease.
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