The accumulation of amyloid plaques, a biological marker of Alzheimer’s disease, does not always result in a severe decline in cognitive function. In some people, the brain is more resistant to the first signs of neurodegenerative disease. In any case, this is the hypothesis formulated by researchers at the University of California, in the United States.
The small study focused on a small panel of 71 mentally healthy adults with no signs of cognitive decline. Brain scans showed that 16 of the oldest participants showed amyloid plaques between neurons (presence of beta-amyloid protein aggregates).
All took part in an exercise that involved memorizing a series of photos in detail while scanners recorded their brain activity. The volunteers all had to give back the details they had seen in each photo.
While both groups were successful in the exercise, the group that had amyloid plaques displayed more brain activity when reconstructing memories from successive X-rays.
This difference may seem trivial, but for scientists it suggests that the brains have the ability to adapt and compensate for any abnormalities in the proteins that cause Alzheimer’s disease.
But further research is needed to be able to interpret these initial results and find out if the brain can successfully fight off the first signs of the disease on its own.
brain traininglifelong could play a role in this “super-resistance” to protein degradation linked to Alzheimer’s, suggests Dr. William Jagust, who collaborated on the study published in the journal Nature neuroscience. “It is possible that people who devote time to stimulating brain activities are better able to adapt to the early signs of Alzheimer’s.”
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