Prevention of Alzheimer’s is possible

A new study has found out that consuming pills that prevents the accumulation of toxic molecules in the brain might someday help prevent or delay Alzheimer's disease, says ANI.

According to scientists at Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the study took a three-pronged approach to help subdue early events that occur in the brain long before symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are evident.

The scientists were able to prevent those early events and the subsequent development of brain pathology in experimental animal models in the lab.

"Common diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and dementia are caused in part by abnormal accumulation of certain proteins in the brain," said senior author Huda Zoghbi.

"Some proteins become toxic when they accumulate; they make the brain vulnerable to degeneration. Tau is one of those proteins involved in Alzheimer's disease and dementia. Scientists in the field have been focusing mostly on the final stages of Alzheimer's disease," said first author Cristian Lasagna-Reeves.

"Here we tried to find clues about what is happening at the very early stages of the illness, before clinical irreversible symptoms appear, with the intention of preventing or reducing those early events that lead to devastating changes in the brain decades later," LasagnaReeves added.

The scientists reasoned that if they could find ways to prevent or reduce tau accumulation in the brain, they would uncover new possibilities for developing drug treatments for these diseases. Cells control the amount of their proteins with other proteins called enzymes.

To find which enzymes affect tau accumulation, the scientists systematically inhibited enzymes called kinases.