Today, more than a million people are affected by Alzheimer’s disease in France.. In addition, an estimated 225,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. British researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a mathematical model explaining the progression of the disease in the human brain. But their research also discovered that the disease does not affect a single area of the brain, but that the plaques of tau and beta-amyloid proteins that clump together and cause the disease, accumulate in several areas of the brain at the same time. times.
Scientists believe that this is partly why the disease progresses so rapidly in about ten years after diagnosis.
For this study, the researchers used post-mortem brain samples from patients with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as scans from living patients, to track tau protein aggregation in their brains. “We thought that Alzheimer’s disease develops in a similar way to many cancers and the aggregates formed in one area of the brain and then spread,” explained Dr. Georg Meisl, main author of thestudy. “But instead, we found that when Alzheimer’s disease starts, there are already clumps in several regions of the brain, and so trying to stop its spread from one area to another is not not what needs to be done to slow the disease down,” he added, hoping that this discovery can help in the development of new treatments.
The disease that scares the most after cancer
Some time ago, the Alzheimer Europe association, which campaigns for the setting up of a early detection of Alzheimer’s disease, had launched a major survey of public knowledge of this disease. This survey had shown that 4 out of 10 Europeans are unaware that the disease can be fatal but that these same Europeans still place Alzheimer’s disease the second most feared disease, after cancer and tied with stroke.
Source:
In vivo rate-determining steps of tau seed accumulation in Alzheimer’s diseaseScience advances, October 2021
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