2023-07-28 08:55:05
July 28, 2023 Today at 10:53 am
How to diagnose the disease “before” (death) quite reliably? UCLouvain scientists have found a lead that opens up prospects for a more reliable diagnosis.
A team of scientists from the UCLouvain Institute of Neuroscience, led by Prof. Bernard Hanseeuw, has just brought to light a track that opens up prospects for a more reliable ante-mortem diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, announces this Friday the neo-Louvanist university. This study is published in the journal Nature Communications.
For years, scientists trying to better understand Alzheimer’s disease or other neurodegenerative disorders – tauopathies, because they involve the tau protein – have indeed come up once morest a difficulty: how to diagnose the disease “before” (death) quite reliably? Since today only the autopsy makes it possible to describe the aggregates of tau protein in the brain (characteristic of many cerebral pathologies) and therefore to know with certainty what type of neurodegenerative disease the person suffered from.
Read also
Promising results for a new treatment once morest Alzheimer’s
In other words, if currently we can take cerebrospinal fluid by lumbar puncture from the living patient and find that the tau protein is diseased, it is impossible to identify the disease, on the basis of this sample.
Nevertheless, researchers from the Institute of Neuroscience (IoNS) had the idea of exploring another avenue with the support of a powerful tool available at the Duve Institute of UCLouvain, mass spectrometry, able to characterize proteins.
Better understand the aggregation process
“The originality of the work is to have compared the soluble protein and the aggregates, whereas most biochemists work on the aggregates, visible under the microscope”, emphasizes Professor Bernard Hanseeuw.
On a more fundamental level, this comparison makes it possible to better understand the aggregation process which is at the origin of neurodegenerative diseases, and opens the way to more reliable diagnoses as well as possible treatments.
Read also
Alzheimer’s disease: “We are going straight to a crisis of dementia”
In Belgium, approximately 100,000 people suffer from dementia. The majority of them have Alzheimer’s disease; a minority suffer from primary tauopathies such as corticobasal degeneration, Pick’s disease or frontotemporal lobe degeneration.
1690535601
#key #detecting #Alzheimers #neurodegenerative #diseases
