It is one piece in the puzzle that could provide us with an explanation as to why head injuries may be connected to Alzheimer's. It’s not necessarily correct – but it is plausible.
- Clemens Kaminski
A powerful laser imaging technique has been used by researchers to show how minute quantities of a protein associated with Alzheimer’s Disease trigger a process which may be crucial to its onset and spread.
The study also potentially links neuronal damage – for example, through brain injury, or head injuries sustained in contact sports – to the onset of Alzheimer’s.
The researchers involved, however, are urging caution about the results, stressing that the study used a model cell culture and that the processes, which enable the disease to take root and develop in the brain could be far more complicated.
“These are molecular-level glimpses of what may be going on,” Clemens Kaminski, Professor of Chemical Physics at the University of Cambridge, who led the research, said. “We are just beginning to see the molecular steps that may provide an explanation for what we see in the brains of patients who have died of Alzheimer’s.”
The study, reported in The Journal Of Biological Chemistry, focused on tau, a protein normally found inside healthy brain cells. In the brains of people who have died of Alzheimer’s, however, clusters of malfunctioning tau are also found, and these appear to play a critical role in preventing their brain cells from working properly.
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Image - Left: Neuronal cells have ingested Tau protein, which appears in green (scale bar: 10 μm). Right: Optical super-resolution microscopy reveals that ingested protein (red) causes internal protein (green) to form fibrillar aggregates (scale bar: 500 nm).
Credit: Clemens Kaminski.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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