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Experts from King's College London have presented the results of a study that has made it possible to diagnose Alzheimer's disease early, which is one of the main forms of age-related dementia - a thinking disorder that occurs with age.

The London Alzheimer's Disease Research Project, funded by the Alzheimer's Research Trust, has been running for five years and its findings are now published in the journal Brain.

Using a procedure called proteomics - the study of blood proteins - two specific proteins were isolated from patients that are not present in healthy people. Scientists compared the blood of 500 patients with Alzheimer's disease with the blood of an equal number of elderly people who did not have symptoms of the disease.

"This is definitely good news," says Simon Lovestone, a professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London. "We have found differences in the protein content of the blood in people with Alzheimer's disease. It is a very devastating disease and at present it is difficult to diagnose and predict... Blood testing could be a very promising diagnostic tool."

As experts have found, elevated levels of two types of protein in the blood may indicate an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease in the future.

In the blood of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the level of control proteins was higher than in apparently healthy people.

Scientists hope that their method will help identify a predisposition to the disease long before the first symptoms of the illness appear. Although Alzheimer's disease is a neurodegenerative disease and is currently considered incurable, early diagnosis will allow supportive therapy to begin as early as possible and significantly improve the patient's quality of life.

Russian scientists are not lagging behind their British colleagues, but they diagnose, or rather predict, the likelihood of the disease based on the analysis of encephalograms.

As reported by the official website of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Kropotov’s group from the Institute of Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg studied the encephalograms of elderly people for 30 years, comparing them with the normative database.

The work was complicated by the fact that in different people these critical signs can be located in different parts of the brain, but in the end the scientists were able to detect characteristic signs of the encephalogram that clearly indicate the possibility of senile dementia in the future.

They have already begun to put their discovery into practice: now anyone can undergo an examination in the laboratory of the Human Brain Institute and find out whether they are at risk of senile dementia (and at the same time add their encephalogram to the institute’s database).

Two other areas of research are searching for the causes of the disease and ways to treat it.

American researchers have for the first time managed to identify a link between a mutation in a gene responsible for the access of potassium ions to cells and neurodegenerative diseases. Stefan Pulst from the medical center at the University of California emphasized: "This type of gene has never before been associated with the death of nerve cells."

Pulst and colleagues linked the disease to a mutation in the KCNC3 gene, which codes for a protein that forms potassium channels, pore-like openings in the cell membrane that regulate the flow of potassium ions into the cell.

Previous studies have found abnormalities in the number of potassium channels in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, so the scientists believe they have found a common mechanism for nerve cell damage.

As for treatment, a new American study should please old hippies

- they, without knowing it, deliberately protected themselves from Alzheimer's disease. As scientists from the Scripps Research Institute in California have established, the active substance of marijuana - delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) can prevent the progression of the disease, maintaining the amount of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which is important for brain function, at the proper level.

The study is published in the October issue of Molecular Pharmaceutics.

Other scientists believe that senile dementia is easier to prevent than to treat

Regular exercise reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease and senile dementia by 40%, according to US scientists. Researchers from the University of Washington say their work is the most thorough study of how exercise affects the development of dementia.

But New Zealand biologists from the Institute of Horticulture and Food Research have found that components of blackcurrants and boysenberries (a hybrid of raspberries and blackberries) can prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease. Doctors have managed to prove the ability of anthocyanin and polyphenols, which are part of the berries, to protect cells from the effects of natural oxidants. Antioxidant protection can reduce the frequency of unfavorable mutations, which provides protection against age-related diseases, the researchers believe.

 

Gazeta.ru