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How the Brain Falls Prey to Alzheimer’s Disease

7/15/2012

First-ever timeline details the evolution of Alzheimer's disease over the years

Scientists with the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer’s Network (DIAN) international research partnership say that they were recently able to develop the first clear timeline detailing how the brain develops Alzheimer’s disease.

The new dataset will come in handy for researchers who are working hard towards finding ways of addressing the condition. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative form of dementia that currently has no cure. Its primary mode of action is by damaging neurons and attacking cognitive capabilities.

Since it primarily manifests itself in the elderly, and the general population of the developed world is growing, the condition is expected to put huge strains on national healthcare systems over the coming decades, PsychCentral reports.

While the therapies experts managed to propose thus far have largely proven ineffectively at treating the condition, some have argued that this is because the dementia starts manifesting clear symptoms only after it has already taken a hold of the brain.

But the team behind the new dataset, which also included scientists from the University of Washington in St. Louis (WUSL) School of Medicine (WUSM), suggests that the earliest signs of the condition set in as many as 25 years before the first discernible symptoms appear.

In order to compare the new timeline, the investigators looked at a series of markers for Alzheimer’s disease that appear long before the condition sets in. This was made possible by surveying 128 test subjects who came from families whose genetic history predisposed them to developing the disease.

“A series of changes begins in the brain decades before the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease are noticed by patients or families, and this cascade of events may provide a timeline for symptomatic onset,” WUSM expert and lead study author, Randall Bateman, MD, says.

“Family members without the Alzheimer’s mutations have no detected change in the markers we tested. It’s striking how normal the Alzheimer’s markers are in family members without a mutation,” he goes on to say.

The research was made possible by funds provided through the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Details of the work were published in the latest issue of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

“As we learn more about the origins of Alzheimer’s to plan preventive treatments, this Alzheimer’s timeline will be invaluable for successful drug trials,” Bateman concludes.

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Experts to Map the Fruit Fly Brain.

4/22/2010

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This will be done one neuron at a time

A group of scientists announces the development of a new computer model that is capable of producing a type of science never before thought possible. The team plans to create maps of the fruit fly brain one cell at a time, in a bid to produce the first map of how neurons interact in their cortex. The end goal is to determine how the neurons on the insect work together to perform even the simplest tasks. In order for this to become possible, the investigators first need to create networks of how the cells work together, in a research that could provide a powerful new tool for future investigations of the human brain as well, Wired reports.

According to scientists, there are about 100,000 neurons in the brain of a single fruit fly. Our cortices feature no less than 100 billion neurons, and so having a well-established starting point in mapping them could prove to be useful. At this point, one of the main obstacles in producing maps of how our own nerve cells interact is the fact that their synapses are simply too complex to handle. Each single neuron can connect to thousands of others, and stretch its axon for a few centimeters in the brain. Therefore, if the new work on the fruit fly is successful, experts could at least benefit from a clear starting point in their laborious work.

What the experts behind the new work are striving for is creating a “master plan” of the fruit fly brain. “We can see very beautiful and very complicated patterns. If you look at neurons at a better resolution, or look at regions you’ve never looked at before, you’ll find something new,” says Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Farm Research Campus expert Hanchuan Peng. He presented the new model at the 51st Annual Drosophila Research Conference, on April 9. Details of the work also appear in a paper published in the April issue of the respected scientific journal Nature Biotechnology.

“What we want to do in the next few years is to add more and more neuron reconstructions into this map. If you think about the fruit fly brain as the Earth, the little neurons will be the streets. We want to map a lot of neuron streets onto the Earth,” adds Peng, who is also a coauthor of the new journal entry. One of the main discoveries the team has made thus far was observing that particular sets of neurons, which at first glance seemed to be faithful copies of each other, exhibit importance functional differences.

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How the Brain Falls Prey to Alzheimer’s Disease

Experts to Map the Fruit Fly Brain.

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