A revolutionary new model for Alzheimer's disease
Friday, February 20, 2009 - 09:23
in Health & Medicine
A study from the Buck Institute for Age Research offers a revolutionary new model for Alzheimer's disease (AD), a devastating neurodegenerative disorder which afflicts 24 million people worldwide. In an effort to unravel the normal function of a protein implicated in AD, scientists in California and France have discovered a naturally occurring protein that provides a new therapeutic target for the disease. The finding upsets the current theory that AD is a disease of toxicity stemming from damage caused by sticky plaques that collect in the brain - this research points to the condition as a disorder involving an imbalance in signalling between neurones. The study appears online in the Nature publication Cell Death and Differentiation...