An international scientific study has found thatsome of the brain abnormalities associated with Alzheimer’s diseasecould respond to an infectious process similar to that which occurs inprion diseases such as “mad cow” disease or Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. The work, which has been published in the magazineMolecular Psychiatry, has the participation of Joaquín Castilla, Spanish researcher at the Bilbao Cooperative Research Center in Biosciences.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of senile dementia and affects memory, thinking, and behavior. It is associated with the accumulation of a misfolded peptide in the brain, the so-calledb-amyloid protein, and although there is evidence that misfolding and the subsequent formation of small aggregates are its trigger, the molecular mechanisms by which they produce the disease are still unknown.
“Our findings open the possibility that some cases of Alzheimer’s arise from an infectious process,” explains Claudio Soto, a neurologist at the University of Texas School of Medicine. Soto and his colleagues reached this conclusion after injecting brain tissue from a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s into mice and verifying that all the rodents showed alterations in their brains typical of the disease, and very far from the injection site.
However, although the study has shown that “the main event, the formation of amyloid plaques, can reproduce artificially in a similar way to what occurs in a prion infection, extrapolating this data to the fact that Alzheimer’s disease is an infectious disease is still premature “explained Joaquín Castilla.
