Alzheimer’s disease, which causes impaired memory and intellect , affects millions of people around the world. Now, a study led by the Nobel laureate Susumu Tonewaga, opens a new avenue of hope in the face of the effects of this disease.
And it is that in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, patients are unable to remember recent experiences – as if they had never happened – but these memories do not disappear, they are only still stored in the brain, but the problem is that they cannot be easily accessed to them.
The team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), however, has managed to show that these memories are formed and stored properly in the brain and the main obstacle is, due to the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, in recovering them.
All is not lost, they can be rescued again
Their experiment used mice in the early stages of the disease. They discovered that by optogenetically activating the neurons in the hippocampus that contain the memories, they returned , they had recovered; basically because they existed (they had been stored correctly), but the brain could not access them.
“ This is a proof of concept . That is, even when a memory seems to have disappeared, it is actually still present. The question is how to access and recover it, ”says Susumu Tonewaga, study leader.
In addition, Tonegawa’s team found that the mice had more dendritic spines – the terminals of neurons – than before the experiment. Scientists previously found that in mice with Alzheimer’s, the memory-bearing set of neurons had fewer dendrtric spines than in healthy mice.
“It is possible in the future that a technology will be developed to more precisely activate or inactivate cells deep in the brain, such as the hippocampus or the entorhinal cortex, with more precision,” says Tonegawa.
The study has been published in the journal Nature .
