Tue, Mar-17-20, 02:33
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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Dementia link to inflammation of brain boosts treatment hopes
Dementia link to inflammation of brain boosts treatment hopes
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...hopes-q83vlh8dl
Quote:
Inflammation in the brain appears to play a larger role in different forms of dementia than had been thought, according to a study that raises hope for new types of treatment.
Cambridge University researchers found that by mapping the location of inflammation they could identify and distinguish three types of frontotemporal dementia, a condition that hits people as early as their thirties and affects about 16,000 in Britain. The scientists have also discovered that levels of inflammation in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, are a powerful indicator of how aggressively their symptoms are likely to progress.
James Rowe, of the university’s department of clinical neurosciences, said: “This research gives us a green light to explore anti-inflammatory strategies for dementia . . . Brain inflammation is seen before symptoms, it matches the areas of brain damage and it predicts a fast or slow decline.”
Inflammation seems to be locked into a vicious circle with “junk proteins” such as tau that accumulate in the brain. “Breaking this cycle with targeted immune-based treatments for the brain could slow or prevent the dementia,” Professor Rowe added.
There is no cure at present for frontotemporal dementia or any treatment that will slow it down. The effects on families can be huge, because it progresses more rapidly than Alzheimer’s, often affecting people of working age with dependent children, and because it can be inherited.
Inflammation is usually the body’s response to injury and stress such as the redness and swelling that accompanies an injury or infection. However, inflammation in the brain, known as neuro-inflammation, can be harmful. It has been linked to depression, psychosis and multiple sclerosis.
For the study, researchers recruited 31 patients with three different types of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). One type, called behavioural variant, affects personality and behaviour, making people less empathetic and more impulsive and likely to engage in inappropriate behaviour.
Another form, called semantic dementia, means people lose their knowledge of words and objects. A third type, called non-fluent aphasia, affects a person’s ability to use language, often causing slow and fragmented speech.
By injecting subjects with a special dye and then taking positron emission tomography (Pet) scans of their brains, the researchers could predict which form of dementia a subject was likely to have. For instance, those with the personality variant tended to have inflammation in the frontal lobe, a region associated with behaviour, thought and planning and which seems to help people comply with social mores. Pet scans also showed that in all three forms of the disease inflammation took place in areas where toxic proteins accumulated inside the brain. The scanning research was backed up by microscopic analysis of brain post-mortem tissue from donors to the Cambridge Brain Bank.
“We expected a link between inflammation in the brain and the build-up of damaging proteins, but even we were surprised by how tightly these two problems mapped on to each other,” Thomas Cope from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences said.
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