2023-09-15 12:00:00
Fatima Khalil wrote Friday, September 15, 2023 03:00 PM
Scientists at the American University of Oregon Health and Science have discovered a new cause behind Alzheimer’s disease and dementia and the destruction of immune cells in the brain, and by studying the brains of patients who died from… Alzheimer’s diseaseResearchers discovered that the cells responsible for removing debris in the brain had died, which caused Alzheimer’s disease, according to what was published by the kgw website.
Dr Stephen Buck, lead researcher at the University of Oregon, said: “We observed unexpected activity in a sample of microglia. Microglia are involved in immune responses in the brain, removing cell debris, but the cells under surveillance did not activate; instead, they were dying.”
The study examined post-mortem brain tissue of patients with dementia, and found that microglia were degenerated in the white matter of the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia.
One of the jobs of microglia is to remove debris from damaged myelin, the insulation-like material around nerve fibers in the brain.
The study discovered a form of neurodegeneration caused by myelin degradation, in which microglia clump together to remove iron-rich myelin debris, only to have the microglia themselves killed in the process. Buck and his team were able to see that microglia were damaged by excess iron, and once they were full With iron, cells begin to die.
The cells were doing what they were supposed to do by removing myelin debris, but they were essentially “dying while doing their job.” “Large numbers of these cells are not available to do their work in the brain,” Buck explained.
Previous research has not uncovered a link between this specific form of iron-related microglia death — known as ferroptosis — and Alzheimer’s disease.
Buck and his team conducted their study on human brains, and he said that was one of the reasons they were able to make this discovery.
“We had 40 of these brains that we studied to try to understand the range of responses these cells might have,” Buck said.
He speculated that the underlying cause of this deterioration might include periods of reduced blood flow and oxygen delivery to the brain due to stroke, high blood pressure or diabetes.
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