New discovery in Alzheimer research.
Despite having signs of dementia, people can escape cognitive decline. What protects them is an abundance of specific neurons.
Dementia is caused by clump-like ‘plaques’ of amyloid, that accumulates in the brain. It slowly kills neurons and eventually destroys memory and cognitive ability.
Neurobiologist Hansruedi Mathys at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in Pennsylvania and neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai and computer scientist Manolis Kellis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and their colleagues decided to investigate this issue.
To do so, they used data from a massive study that tracks cognitive and motor skills in thousands of people throughout old age.
People with dementia, who had greater levels of cognitive impairment, the researchers found, had relatively low numbers of brain protective cells.
These protective inhibitory cells contain reelin or somatostatin. These cells are particularly vulnerable to being destroyed in Alzheimer’s disease, at least in some individuals.
People who had no cognitive impairment had high numbers of the cells, even if they also had large amounts of amyloid in their brains.
The finding supports that of a paper published earlier this year. In this paper researchers studied reelin mutation. A subject was a man with high amounts of amyloid in his brain but no symptoms of Alzheimer’s.
The single-cell sequencing technique and resulting atlas are “state of the art”, says Jerold Chun. He is a neuroscientist at Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, California. He says the loss of inhibitory cells could potentially explain why people with Alzheimer’s are prone to seizures.
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1 个月Anna, thanks for sharing!