In the News X2 (#1)

I saw two recent news articles on Alzheimer's disease and dementia research that I found interesting, and I want to discuss them both.  I'll put them in two different posts.

The AP just published an article on the state of Alzheimer's research that echoed what we have been saying here.  The article was entitled "Scientists rethink Alzheimer’s, diversifying the drug search," and it had some interesting photographs of whole and dissected human brains -- if you're into that sort of thing.  The theme was that the search for a silver bullet pharmaceutical intervention appears to have failed, and a drug approach will need to address a variety of causes of memory loss.

The article cheers the success medical science has had in removing amyloid plaques from brains, but then laments that this has not improved cognition or stopped the progress of the disease.  As we have noted previously, autopsies of people who died of Alzheimer's disease very often exhibit evidence of other causes as well, causes such as Lewy bodies and vascular disease.  This is called mixed dementia, and it is more common than has been appreciated.  Therefore, attacking memory loss must simultaneously attack Alzheimer's disease and the other causes of dementia.

The article went on to discuss other areas where our knowledge of the disease is weak.  We know that herpes virus is often found in the brains of people who died from Alzheimer's disease, so the article discusses a possible link to herpes infection.  (We discussed this in June 2018.)  They also discuss the potential role of gum disease as a player in the etiology of AD -- as we did back in February.  These, of course, raises the possibility of a vaccine for Alzheimer's disease.  So you read it here first.

The article discussed the key role of inflammation in the progress of the disease.  It discussed the role of microglia cells, since they are the brain's immune system.  They attack foreign invader in the brain (and they may perceive amyloid as such an invader), and this immune response includes inflammation.  As with other inflammation responses in the body, the inflammation begins by destroying the enemy but then begins to do a lot of collateral damage to the tissue it is trying to protect.

I was disappointed that the article did not mention lifestyle interventions -- the only way that Alzheimer's sufferer's are currently being helped.  The theme of the article was progress with drug interventions (or lack thereof), but lifestyle intervention research has something to say to drug research.  As several articles have pointed out, understanding why lifestyle changes affect the progress of Alzheimer's disease provides a window into how the disease works and what drug interventions might eventually work.  The Scientific American article we reviewed last October suggested that a drug intervention should attempt to recreate in the brain the conditions that exist during physical exercise.