2023-09-05 04:05:46
04/09/2023
John O’Keefe is a man of 83 years, but of surprising vitality. He has very white hair, and a short beard like cotton. Last week he was in Medellín, invited by the University of Antioquia, and in his short journey he went to Angostura, a town almost three hours from the city, separated from it by 115 kilometers and hundreds of curves that turn the stomach.
O’Keefe was accompanied by Francisco Lopera, the man who has most studied Alzheimer’s disease in our country. Along with Lopera, he walked along sidewalks and dusty roads, surrounded by banana trees, and took a group photo in front of a house with walls that looked like brick.
He looked like one of the many tourists who come to the city. But O’Keefe is not just any visitor. He has spent decades studying brain GPS, the mechanism that helps animals and humans locate themselves in space. It is in the hippocampus and works thanks to the “place cells”, which are the ones that indicate to the individual if he has already been in a place and what his previous experiences are.
The question is what O’Keefe and Lopera were doing in Angostura. The answer is simple, but the story is not that short. The two scientists were sealing the start of an investigation. The title of the study is long, and you lose your breath while reading it in its entirety: Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Preclinical Phase: Multidisciplinary Cross-Species Studies to Understand the Relationship Between Entorhinal-Hippocampal Dysfunction and Spatial Behavior.
For a person without knowledge in the matter, the name is disconcerting, but we will try to explain it in the simplest way possible. This new investigation has two parts that will be developed simultaneously, one in Colombia and the other in the United Kingdom. He intends to study the preclinical phase of people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, that dark disease that erases people’s last memories.
And it is that the disease begins in the hippocampus and from there it spreads. In that part of the brain is where the cells are, an area that O’Keefe has studied for so many years, who in 2014 achieved the greatest distinction that anyone can achieve in his career: the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his contribution to knowledge regarding brain GPS. His contribution to psychology and neuroscience has been enormous.
I mean, if anyone knows regarding the hippocampus, the exact place where Alzheimer’s starts, it’s O’Keefe. It is no coincidence that one of the first symptoms of the disease is dislocation in familiar places. The scene in the film Siempre Alice (2014) in which a still young literature teacher goes jogging through New York on a cloudy morning is memorable.
Although she was apparently a healthy woman, she lost her bearings in the middle of her jogging, and she did not remember how to get home. The teacher already had hippocampal problems and she was showing the first symptoms of a painful disease that led her to death. “Knowing that we knew the physiognomy of that part of the brain (the hippocampus) so well, wouldn’t it be a great idea if we might use that knowledge to investigate patients with these pathologies (…) We hope to contribute to the work that has already been done done here”, O’Keefe said during his visit to Medellín.
The research will be carried out between the Dementia Research Institute —DRI, for its acronym in English—, which is part of University College London, in the United Kingdom; and the GNA, a UdeA research group, attached to the Faculty of Medicine. In Colombia, Lopera’s team of scientists will study 180 people who are carriers and not carriers of the so-called paisa mutation gene, which causes early Alzheimer’s; meanwhile, Dr O’Keefe will study 150 patients in the UK.
The hypothesis prior to the research is that people who carry the gene have brain GPS impairments from a very early age. It is estimated that this area can deteriorate in patients between 18 and 28 years of age. Lopera explained that this might be a kind of follow-up to know the state in which the patients are.
The people who will be studied in Colombia, all belonging to families in which there have been cases of genetic Alzheimer’s, will be divided into three groups: 60 between 18 and 28 years old; 60 between 29 and 39 years old; and 60 over 40 years of age. Of these 180 individuals, 90 will be carriers of the paisa mutation and 90 will not be carriers.
Those who decide to participate in the study must fill out an informed consent and express their willingness to join the project. Medical, neurological and neuropsychological evaluations will be carried out; In addition, a blood sample will be taken, among other tests, to establish if they are suitable for the study. After that, they will be given a virtual reality test and assigned a series of memory tasks that they must perform through an application for a mobile device.
Although the Nobel Prize in Medicine’s run through Antioquia and his team of scientists has ended, the results of this research will be important for the research of Lopera, the man who insisted on finding a cure for the terrible evil of forgetting everything.
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