More Supporting Evidence for the " Amyloid then Tau " View of Alzheimer ' s Disease

Alzheimer's disease is a complex condition because the brain is a complex environment. Neurodegeneration is caused by the accumulation of two forms of protein aggregate, amyloid-β and tau. There is evidence to suggest that each can spur the generation of the other, and that they act in synergy to cause worse harm to the brain than either would alone, but the present consensus is that amyloid-β precedes tau in the development of the condition. It may even turn out to be the case that tau causes the majority of the damage in the later stages of the condition, not amyloid-β. Whether this means that amyloid-β causes tau aggregration is another question entirely, and one that is unlikely to be adequately answered without the development of reliable means to clear amyloid-β from the brain. That has so far proven to be more challenging than was originally hoped, and even those clinical efforts that did remove amyloid-β to some degree failed to show benefits in patients. Varied factions within the research community have their theories as to why this might be the case, and scientists here note one of them - that by the time clinical symptoms manifest, it is past the point at which removing amyloid-β would be helpful, as tau has become the major issue. The rate at which the protein amyloid-β accumulates into the sticky plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) is already slowing by the time a patient would be considered to have preclinical AD, according ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs