Bacteria found in Alzheimer’s brains
Researchers in the UK have used DNA sequencing to examine bacteria in post-mortem brains from patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Their findings suggest increased bacterial populations and different proportions of specific bacteria in Alzheimer’s, compared with healthy brains. The findings may support evidence that bacterial infection and inflammation in the brain could contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease that results in cognitive decline, and eventually death. In the brain, the disease causes neurons to die and break down, and involves high levels of a peptide called amyloid and aggregations of a protein called tau. However, scientists are coming to appreciate that inflammation may also play a role.
“Alzheimer’s brains usually contain evidence of neuroinflammation, and researchers increasingly think that this could be a possible driver of the disease, by causing neurons in the brain to degenerate,” says David Emery, a researcher from the University of Bristol, and an author on the study, which was published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
Journal article:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2017.00195/full
Source:
https://blog.frontiersin.org/2017/07/24/frontiers-in-aging-neuroscience-bacteria-found-in-alzheimers-brains/
#neuroscience #alzheimers #research #bacteria #health #medicine
IIRC there was news of fungi in Alzheimers Brains some time back. Bacteria, fungi... this illness turns brains into cheese.
ReplyDeleteAn obvious question is whether damage and physical changes during alzheimer's degrades the brain/blood barrier and allows bacteria/fungi to invade.
ReplyDeleteWell, since the whole point of the blood/brain barrier seems to be to keep microbes out among other things, their presence in turn tells of the upstream failure of that barrier. In the wider view, this is relevant to the matter of ordering the failures according to relative pathology complication ("pathology causation").
ReplyDelete