Neurodegeneration is a Blend of Damage and Symptoms, Not Nice Neat Categories of Disease and Mechanism

The common neurodegenerative conditions are associated with various different forms of protein aggregation; a few proteins in the body have toxic alternative forms that can spread and cause harm to cells. Alzheimer's disease is associated with amyloid-β and tau, Parkinson's disease with α-synuclein, and so forth. But the decay of the aging brain is not a nice neat process in which one individual exhibits one clear-cut pathology with clear-cut symptoms indicative of that pathology. All protein aggregates occur in every aged person to some degree, and they interact with one another, alongside other mechanisms such as vascular issues in the brain. Diagnosis of a dementia is a case of crudely trying to fit a broad category of symptoms to a broad category of pathology. Just because the situation looks like Alzheimer's doesn't mean it is Alzheimer's by the textbook definition. It is inevitably a messy, complex situation. "One of the things that we've learned in the last decade or so is that a lot of people that we think have dementia from Alzheimer's disease, actually don't. There are other brain diseases that cause the same kind of symptoms as Alzheimer's, including some that we only recently figured out existed." Researchers used brain autopsy data from 375 older adults. This work builds on the work last year to discover another form of dementia caused by TDP-43 proteinopathy now known as LATE. Misfolded TDP-43 protein, which was discovered in 2006, is the "newe...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs