The Microbes of Periodontitis as a Contributing Cause of Alzheimer ' s Disease

The open access review paper I'll point out today is good overview of current thinking on the microbial contribution to Alzheimer's disease, with a particular focus on the microorganisms involved in gum disease, or periodontitis. The past century has seen huge strides in our control over the worst of the microbial life that caused so much suffering and death to our ancestors. Nowadays, of that worst, what is left uncontrolled are those microbes whose impact is more subtle and slow, or where it is inherently challenging to intervene. Tooth decay and gum disease remain widespread because these problems typically do not kill people rapidly, and because none of the simple approaches to unwanted microbes work when it comes to removing problem bacteria from the mouth. In Alzheimer's disease, the dominant theme for research is the aggregation of harmful proteins in the brain, and how exactly it is that these aggregates and their consequences kill cells. The dominant theme for the development of therapies is a focus on removing protein aggregates. This is a good thing for the field of medicine as a whole, as it is the case that protein aggregation is one of the causes of aging, and success in for any one such unwanted protein should eventually lead to technologies to address them all. Unfortunately, large-scale investment in this plan for Alzheimer's disease has produced only very limited positive outcomes over the last decade: many clinical trials have launched and failed. Th...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs