Every month, I’ll be highlighting Alzheimer’s research that is going on RIGHT NOW! Harvested from different websites, journals and podcasts, I’ll translate them into understandable English and share them with you. Today: Plaques and Tangles...NOT what we thought!
Sometimes I think the Human species, in particular the one that lives in the United States, thinks it knows everything. Boss Nass says in Star Wars: Episode One has a similar opinion regarding the Naboo, the Humans who share the world with them. He said to Princess Amidala, “The Naboo think they are so smarty. They think their brains so big.”
We’ve found out that we don’t REALLY know as much as we thought we did. After we “took care of COVID19”, we discovered that things we never even thought about were affected by a cascade of troubles whose root is the pandemic. For example, it’s doubtful that in the summer of 2020 anyone even thought about food and product SHORTAGES (except for sterilizing wipes and toilet paper!), yet here we are, images of countless cargo container ships sitting idle while we go shopping and find empty shelves…
Why would we be surprised that scientists and doctors singing the praises of cures that take care of Alzheimer’s “plaques and tangles” and that all we have to do is find a pill that, when popped, would make the plaques and tangles for “POOF!”.
And here we are; at least two “wonder cures” for Alzheimer’s a lost cause…“For the first time, researchers have used human data to quantify the speed of different processes that lead to Alzheimer’s disease and found that it develops in a very different way than previously thought.”
Huh…how long have they been really trying to find a cure?
“Alzheimer's disease was first described in 1906. In the century since then, scientists have made remarkable strides in understanding how Alzheimer's affects the brain and learning how to make life better for affected individuals and families. Below are some important milestones in our progress, including the founding of the Alzheimer's Association in 1980, which has played a key role in advancing research and raising awareness of the disease.”
Where the previous treatments targeted the proteins found in plaques and tangles, this new data finds that instead of SPREADING from one place in the brain, the proteins start all over the brain and grow individually…
“‘The thinking had been that Alzheimer’s develops in a way that’s similar to many cancers: the aggregates form in one region and then spread through the brain,’ said Dr Georg Meisl from Cambridge’s Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, the paper’s first author. ‘But instead, we found that when Alzheimer’s starts there are already aggregates in multiple regions of the brain, and so trying to stop the spread between regions will do little to slow the disease.’”
As you can imagine, we seemed to have been blindsided by our battle against cancer – because that’s how cancers grow. A cancerous lump in the breast “leaks” cancer cells, which pass through the bloodstream and “take root” elsewhere in the body – the technical term is that the cancer “metastasizes”.
Of course, Alzheimer treatments are created that tackle the problem as if it were a cancer…
But that’s apparently not how Alzheimer’s works. “In AD, tau and another protein called amyloid-beta build up into tangles and plaques – known collectively as aggregates. Brain cells die off because of the interaction with the invasive proteins, and the brain begins to shrink. This results in memory loss, personality changes and difficulty carrying out daily functions.”
At this early stage, there’s nothing to be “done”, but unlike cancers, autoimmune diseases, such a Rheumatoid Arthritis and Multiple Sclerosis, can start in different places of the body; different joints or body systems for example.
While doctors still don’t have RH and MS “under control”, perhaps further research will show that treatments for autoimmune diseases will provide insight in to developing new treatments for Alzheimer’s.
Resources: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029152240.htm, https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/research_progress/milestones
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