Some Alzheimer's Disease Cases May Arise From an Infectious Process
The findings open the possibility that some of the sporadic Alzheimer’s disease cases may arise from an infectious process, which occurs with other neurological diseases such as mad cow and its human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The underlying mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease is very similar to the prion diseases. It involves a normal protein that becomes misshapen and is able to spread by transforming good proteins to bad ones. The bad proteins accumulate in the brain, forming plaque deposits that are believed to kill neuron cells in Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a form of progressive dementia that affects memory, thinking and behavior. Of the estimated 5.4 million cases of Alzheimer’s disease in the United States, 90 percent are sporadic. The plaques caused by misshapen aggregates of beta amyloid protein, along with twisted fibers of the protein tau, are the two major hallmarks associated with the disease. Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
Researchers injected the brain tissue of a confirmed Alzheimer’s disease patient into mice and compared the results to those from injected tissue of a control without the disease. None of the mice injected with the control showed signs of Alzheimer’s disease, whereas all of those injected with Alzheimer’s disease brain extracts developed plaques and other brain alterations typical of the disease.
The researchers took a normal mouse model that spontaneously does not develop any brain damage and injected a small amount of Alzheimer’s disease human brain tissue into the animal’s brain. The mouse developed Alzheimer’s disease over time and it spread to other portions of the brain. We are currently working on whether disease transmission can happen in real life under more natural routes of exposure.
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