Different Invasive Bacterial Species are Found in Alzheimer ' s Brains versus Normal Brains

Research into the effects of the human microbiome on health and aging has progressed quite rapidly in recent years. It now costs little to sequence a sample to determine the which bacterial species are present and in what proportions. With age, the intestinal barrier, blood vessels, and blood-brain barrier begin to leak, allowing greater passage of microbes into the body. Additionally, the immune system declines in function, reducing the ability to clear these microbes from tissues. In the case of patients with Alzheimer's disease, researchers are finding that the gut microbiome exhibits characteristic differences when compared with old people without this condition. The work here shows that this difference extends to the microbes leaking into the brain. This may indicate that specific immune dysfunction is present in Alzheimer's disease, favoring certain microbial species, or more likely, that changes in the microbiome provide an important contribution to the onset and progression of this form of dementia. The precise details as to why this is the case, over and above merely considering increased inflammation, remain to be determined. When biomes turn unhealthy, either by invasion of outside pathogens, or a major change in the relative numbers of the microbial species present, a dysbiosis, or imbalance in the microbiota, occurs. This dysbiosis can alter human metabolism and cause inflammation, which has been linked to the tissue damage seen in ulcerative coli...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs