Insights into the Cause of Alzheimer's Disease

 
Alzheimer is a widely spread
illness among older people
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Scientists are gaining ever more insight into the causative mechanisms involved in Alzheimer's disease. Thus, they can identify possible attack points for a targeted, causative treatment of this severe brain disorder, as reported at the international conference "Neurodegenerative Diseases: Molecular Mechanisms in a Functional Genomics Framework” in the Max Delbrück Communications Center in Berlin-Buch (Germany).

"Alzheimer's is a disease of old age,” Dr. Christian Haass, Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University Munich said at the Berlin conference. In 1992, he succeeded in showing that the insoluble protein fragments that are deposited in the brains of Alzheimer's patients, the so-called amyloid beta, are continually formed in the brain throughout life and are part of the normal aging process. The scientist is convinced that all people, if they lived long enough, would fall ill with this severe degenerative disorder of the brain.

Amyloid beta develops when the so-called amyloid precursor protein (APP) is broken into fragments. It quickly became clear that Amyloid beta is generated by proteolytic processing involving two types of proteases, beta-, and gamma-secretase. "Inhibiting the activity of these two enzymes should slow down nerve cell degeneration,” Dr. Haass said in Berlin. These enzymes could, therefore, be potential drug targets.

Yet Alzheimer's disease still baffles scientists: while they have a good understanding of how protein fragments develop, they cannot explain how these fragments prove to be toxic to nerve cells. Dr. Roberto Cappai, Professor at the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, reported in Berlin that copper ions influence the formation of harmful protein deposits. The higher the level of copper in the brain, the less amyloid beta (which is neurotoxic) is formed. Scientists have been able to show that the level of copper in Alzheimer's patients is very low.

REHACARE.de; Source: alphagalileo.org

- More information about Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine at: www.mdc-berlin.de

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