American researchers are suggesting a preventive treatment pathway to identify patients at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease before the onset of the first symptoms. A first.
Recent scientific work suggests a new avenue of preventive treatment against Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia. According to the association France Alzheimer, nearly 3 million people live with this disease. Unfortunately, there is no cure, and after the onset of the disease, symptoms tend to gradually worsen.
Researchers at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, United States), however, suggest that memantine, one of the treatments used to reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms, could help stop the disease before the first symptoms appear.
“The best hope in beating this disease is to first identify patients at risk and start treating them with new drugs and perhaps lifestyle adjustments that would reduce the rate at which the silent phase of the disease. disease progresses, ”says George Bloom, a professor at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. “Ideally, we should prevent it from starting right off the bat,” he adds.
Cell cycle reentry process
In this study published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, the researchers explain that Alzheimer’s disease begins long before the first symptoms appear: perhaps even a decade in advance. One of the hallmarks of the disease is that once affected by the disease, brain cells break down. In medical jargon, this attempt to divide affected neurons is referred to as the “cell cycle reentry process”.
“It is estimated that up to 90% of neural death that occurs in the brain follows this process of reentrying the cell cycle, which corresponds to an abnormal attempt at division,” explains Professor Bloom.
Recent advances in Alzheimer’s disease research are speeding up the process of designing better therapies and dramatically reducing the effects of this disease. “At the end of the disease, the patient will have lost about 30% of the neurons in the frontal lobes of the brain”, estimates Prof. Bloom.
Excess calcium
According to Erin Kodis, co-author of the study and former doctoral student of Prof. Bloom, this mechanism could be triggered by excess calcium entering neurons through special receptors called NMDA receptors. “This excess could cause brain cells to start the process of division,” she speculates.
A series of laboratory experiments confirmed that his hypothesis was correct. “We have found that this mechanism is set in motion before the formation of amyloid plaques, which are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Erin Kodis.
Memantine can profoundly modify the disease
Erin Kodis found that when neurons encounter beta-amyloid molecules in the early stages before plaque buildup, NMDA receptors open up to receive excess calcium which ultimately leads to their destruction. In addition, the researcher made another discovery: the molecule contained in memantine prevented reentry of the cell cycle by shutting down NMDA receptors on the surface of neurons.
“These results suggest that memantine could have potent disease-modifying properties if it could be given to patients long before they become symptomatic and receive a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease,” concludes Prof. Bloom, who sees in this discovery a lead towards a preventive approach which would make it possible to detect Alzheimer’s disease as early as possible.
“I do not want to raise false hopes”, tempers Professor Bloom. But if the idea of using memantine as a prophylactic comes to fruition, it will be because we now understand that calcium is one of the disease-causing agents, and we may be able to stop or slow down the process if we let’s do it very early, ”says the scientist who plans to launch a clinical trial with his team to test the prevention strategy described in his study.
.
