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By Pandora Dewan
Senior Science Reporter
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Alzheimer's disease damages the brain before any symptoms begin to appear, new research suggests. This is part of a new two-step model of Alzheimer's progression, which features an early "silent" stage of brain damage.
Alzheimer's affects roughly 5.8 million Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The progressive disease is the most common form of dementia and is associated with memory loss and cognitive decline in the brain regions involved in thought, memory and language.
The disease is associated with a buildup of abnormal proteins inside and around our brain cells, the accumulation of which was thought to occur during the earliest stage of the disease. However, according to new research, this destructive protein accumulation might occur further down the disease's timeline than we once thought.
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With the help of sophisticated brain-mapping tools, a team of Seattle researchers from the Allen Institute of Brain Science and the University of Washington analyzed the brains of 84 deceased donors at various stages of cognitive decline.
"This new research created an atlas of Alzheimer's disease that shows that specific types of cells are vulnerable as disease progresses, and specific types of neurons are lost early in disease," Ed Lein, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute and one of the study's co-authors, told Newsweek.
"This finding opens up new perspectives beyond the plaques and tangles that are hallmarks of disease, to thinking of Alzheimer's as a 'circuit' disorder affecting specific types of neurons whose degeneration eventually leads to cognitive decline."
By creating this "atlas," the team uncovered two distinct phases during the disease's progression. The first was marked by an increase in inflammation and the loss of three key brain cell types. The second was marked by the distinctive buildup of abnormal proteins and brain cell loss seen in Alzheimer's patients.
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"One of the challenges to diagnosing and treating Alzheimer's is that much of the damage to the brain happens well before symptoms occur," Richard Hodes, director of the National Institutes of Health's National Institute on Aging which supported the research, said in a statement.
"The ability to detect these early changes means that, for the first time, we can see what is happening to a person's brain during the earliest periods of the disease," he said.
Lein added: "These findings could conceivably lead to new ways to diagnose disease earlier, or potentially even strategies to prevent their loss to prevent the progression of disease."
Is there a health problem that's worrying you? Do you have a question about Alzheimer's disease? Let us know via health@newsweek.com. We can ask experts for advice and your story could be featured in Newsweek.
Update 10/22/24 7:40 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include additional comment from Ed Lein.
Reference
Gabitto, M.I., Travaglini, K.J., Rachleff, V.M., Kaplan, E.S., Long, B., Ariza, J., Ding, Y., Mahoney, J.T., Dee, N., Goldy, J., Melief, E.J., Agrawal, A., Kana, O., Zhen, X., Barlow, S. T., Brouner, K., Campos, J., Campos, J., Carr, A.J., Lein, E.S. (2024). Integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer's disease. Nature Neuroscience, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01774-5
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