Fructose Metabolism in Alzheimer ' s Disease

The degree to which Alzheimer's disease is a lifestyle condition is an interesting question. A good deal of research points to insulin resistance in the brain as important in the progression of Alzheimer's disease, to the point at which one group declared Alzheimer's to be a type 3 diabetes, a condition that should be thought of as primarily metabolic in origin. That idea gained enough traction that when a definitively new type of diabetes was discovered, it had to be named type 4 diabetes to avoid confusion. Insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes are a consequence of being overweight in the vast majority of patients, but Alzheimer's disease isn't as obviously directly a consequence of excess fat as is the case for type 2 diabetes. Fewer overweight people develop Alzheimer's disease than develop type 2 diabetes - it isn't the same picture at all as the comparatively reliable progression to metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and then type 2 diabetes that happens as a result of excessive weight gain. Nonetheless, the disrupted metabolism of overweight people does look compelling as a contributing cause of this form of neurodegenerative condition. The loss of cognitive function in Alzheimer's disease is pathologically linked with neurofibrillary tangles, amyloid deposition, and loss of neuronal communication. Cerebral insulin resistance and mitochondrial dysfunction have emerged as important contributors to pathogenesis supporting our hypothesis that cerebra...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs