Alzheimer’s disease tagged posts

Ceftriaxone partially restores glutamate dynamic deficits around Aβ deposits.

New research from the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at UBC has found a way to partially restore brain cell communication around areas damaged by plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The findings, published this week in Nature Communications, demonstrate a possible target and a potential drug treatment to reduce damage to the brain that occurs in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Using Ceftriaxone, an FDA-approved antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, researchers were able to reduce synaptic disruption and clear the lines of neuronal communication in mice.

Amyloid plaques of -amyloid deposits develop in brain regions of patients with Alzheimer’s disease, These plaques are link...

Retro-inverso peptide inhibitor nanoparticles as potent inhibitors of aggregation of the Alzheimer’s Aβ peptide

New Alzheimer’s Rx could be delivered as nasal spray. A novel treatment could block the development of Alzheimer’s disease using microscopic droplets of fat, nanoliposomes, coated in protein fragments to carry drugs into the brain. This treatment approach, which is used to target drugs to cancer cells, has been successfully applied to Alzheimer’s disease for the first time, restoring memory loss in mice. The method stops amyloid protein accumulating into plaques, even at low concentrations.

Mice that were genetically altered to develop Alzheimer’s disease were injected with the nanoliposomes for three weeks...

Georgios Tsiminis in his photonics laboratory. Credit: University of Adelaide

A 1st step towards a low-cost, portable, broadscale vitamin B12 deficiency test has been developed. Vitamin B12 deficiency is associated with an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Such a device would enable the tracking of vitamin B12 levels in high-risk patients and early intervention – to top up vitamin B12 levels when low – and help overcome the limitations of current testing methods which are time-consuming and costly.

“Vitamin B12 deficiency has been shown to be a potential modifiable risk factor for dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and is associated with cognitive decline,” says Dr Georgios Tsiminis, Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide...

Brain cells from a mouse cortex that didn’t receive the gene therapy. The amyloid plaques are shown in green, and the glial cells, which surround the plaques, are shown in red (microglia) and magenta (astrocytes). Image 2 shows a mouse cortex that received the gene therapy, and so had fewer amyloid plaques. Credit: Imperial College London

Researchers have prevented development of Alzheimer’s disease in mice by using a modified virus to deliver a specific gene into the brain. The early-stage findings, by scientists from Imperial College London, open avenues for potential new treatments for the disease. Previous studies by the same team suggest this gene, called PGC1 – alpha, may prevent the formation of a protein called amyloid-beta peptide in cells in the lab...