The "Science" behind Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer’s is a brain disorder.  It damages and kills brain cells.  Ultimately, Alzheimer’s is fatal, and currently there is no cure.  Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia.  Dementia is used to describe various diseases and conditions that damage brain cells.

So far, scientists have been able to identify several steps along the progression of Alzheimer’s .  Hopefully, knowing what happens will eventually lead to ways to prevent or cure these complications.  First, plaques form.  Plaques are microscopic clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid peptide.  Another problem that occurs is that tangles form.  These tangles are twisted microscopic strands of the protein tau.  Then a loss of connections among brain cells occurs.  These connections are the ones responsible for memory, learning, and communication.  Inflammation results from the brain’s effort to fend off the lethal effects of the other problems.  Eventually, the brain cells begin to die and the brain mass shrinks. To see an interactive presentation of how the brain is affected, click here.

As Michael brought up in his comment on the last post, a lot of the risk of Alzheimer’s runs in the genes.  There is tons of research going on that looks at the proteins, genes that code for the proteins, and the processes that are supposed to remove these proteins.  In one study, neuropathologist Lea T.  Grinberg studies the physical biology of brains collected in a brain bank.  She helped establish the Brain Bank in Brazil and has legally acquired more then 2500 brain samples from residents that have died with and without dementia symptoms.  The goal is to determine why some people have the same pathology levels associated with Alzheimers but never showed symptoms of the disease.  They also hope to find whether there is a connection between ethnic background and the disease. 

The National Institute of Aging suggests that the problem of buildup of the beta-amyloid protein is not that it is being produced at an abnormally fast rate, but that it is just not being cleared out of the brain effectively.

Although the process of diagnosing Alzheimer's continues to change, there is growing hope that we will soon be able to identify the processes that cause the problem and find cures for them.  

I say "science" in the title because I think the general public only likes to call it science if it works.  Currently, we don't know what causes Alzheimer's, who is at risk, how to fix it, or even what to do to prevent it.  As I stated in the last post, we are doing extensive research on each of those topics, and we have some good ideas of how to diagnosis it, but this disease has stumped many brilliant minds.