How to Diagnose Alzheimer’s Through Retina

Calendar September 13, 2022 | Posted by admin

The onset of Alzheimer’s disease can be diagnosed by examining proteins in the retina instead of complicated and invasive PET scans or cerebrospinal fluid analysis. Alzheimer’s disease – the progressive neurological disorder that causes the brain to shrink and brain cells to die – is the most common cause of dementia. The disease causes a continuous decline in thinking, behavior and social skills that affect a person’s ability to function independently.

But while the disorder is incurable, it is important to diagnose it as rapidly as possible so measures can be taken to slow the decline. Doctors hope to eventually develop treatments to reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

But now, doctors in the ophthalmology department of the Samson Assuta-Ashdod University Hospital suggest a much simpler way to diagnose Alzheimer’s – by looking for beta-amyloid plaques and abnormal tau proteins in the retina of the eye. The advantage is the accessibility of the retina for direct visualization by non-invasive means.

The retina is a component of the central nervous system that can easily be accessed by technology used routinely by ophthalmologists, they wrote. Photoreceptors in this “screen” at the back of the eye absorb light and transfer data to the retinal ganglion cell layer. Axons (long, slender nerve fibers) in this layer accumulate along the retinal nerve fiber layer and transfer the data to the brain via the optic nerve connected to the eye.

Since the retina is connected to the brain, it seems that changes in this part of the eye reflect pathological processes in the brain, the authors wrote, including the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Amyloid-beta plaques have been found in the retina of cadavers in autopsies of people who died of Alzheimer’s.

Turmeric is a natural, intensely yellow-colored spice that attaches itself to plaques of amyloid-beta. Ten Alzheimer’s patients and six healthy controls were asked to swallow turmeric capsules. A few days later, their retinas were examined. The yellow spice was found to stick to the retinal cells in Alzheimer’s patients but not in the healthy controls. Other non-invasive tests of the retina – including optical coherence tomography and optical coherence tomography angiography – were also conducted and found to point to the early development of Alzheimer’s, the authors wrote. Still, larger tests must be conducted with these means before they can be implemented clinically. A clear biomarker must also be found in the individual to be sure the patient is developing Alzheimer’s and sent for treatments, they concluded.

The research, just published in the latest issue of Harefuah – the Hebrew-language journal of the Israel Medical Association – was conducted by Drs. Keren Wood of the Samson Assuta Ashdod Hospital and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Idit Maharshak of Wolfson Medical Center in Holon and Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, and Yosef Koronyo and Maya Koranyo-Hamaoui of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

Source: https://www.jpost.com/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Alzheimer’s Is Actually 3 Distinct Disease Subtypes

Calendar January 11, 2021 | Posted by admin

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is probably more diverse than our traditional models suggest. Postmortem, RNA sequencing has revealed three major molecular subtypes of the disease, each of which presents differently in the brain and which holds a unique genetic risk.  Such knowledge could help us predict who is most vulnerable to each subtype, how their disease might progress and what treatments might suit them best, potentially leading to better outcomes. It could also help explain why effective treatments for AD have proved so challenging to find thus far.

“The mouse models we currently have for pharmaceutical research match a particular subset of AD,  but not all subtypes simultaneously. This may partially explain why a vast majority of drugs that succeeded in specific mouse models do not align with generalised human trials across all AD subtypes,”  say the authors. “Therefore,” the authors conclude, “subtyping patients with AD is a critical step toward precision medicine for this devastating disease.”

Traditionally, AD is thought to be marked by clumps of amyloid-beta plaques (Aβ), as well as tangles of tau proteins (NFTs) found in postmortem biopsies of the brain. Both of these markers have become synonymous with the disease, but in recent years our leading hypotheses about what they actually do to our brains have come under question. Typically, accumulations of Aβ and NFT are thought to drive neuronal and synaptic loss, predominantly within the cerebral cortex and hippocampus. Further degeneration then follows, including inflammation and degeneration of nerve cells‘ protective coating, which causes signals in our brains to slow down.

Strangely enough, however, recent evidence has shown up to a third of patients with a confirmed, clinical diagnosis have no Aβ plaques in postmortem biopsies. What’s more, many of those found with plaques at death did not show cognitive impairment in life. Instead of being an early trigger of AD, setting off neurodegeneration and driving memory loss and confusion, in some people, Aβ plaques appear to be latecomers. On the other hand, recent evidence suggests tau proteins are there from the very earliest stages.

In light of all this research, it’s highly likely there are specific subtypes of AD that we simply haven’t teased apart yet. The new research has helped unbraid three major strands. To do this, researchers analysed 1,543 transcriptomes – the genetic processes being express in the cell – across five brain regions, which were collected post mortem from two AD cohorts.

Source: https://advances.sciencemag.org/

Category Categories: Uncategorized  |  Tag Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,