Alzheimer’s disease may come in distinct forms
Mouse experiments, if confirmed in people, imply that treatment should be personalized
BY LAURA SANDERS 3:36PM, JUNE 30, 2014
DISEASE DIFFERENCES Clumps of A-beta (brown) take on distinct shapes in the brains of mice injected with brain samples from people whose Alzheimer’s disease was caused by different mutations, called Arctic and Swedish, and by a sporadic form.
Alzheimer’s may come in multiple forms, two studies suggest. Distinct versions of a protein snippet called amyloid-beta reliably produce different effects in the brains of mice, scientists report June 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The results are preliminary. But if similarly divergent pathways are found to be important in Alzheimer’s disease in people, the finding might ultimately enable custom-designed treatments, says neuroscientist Kurt Giles of the University of California, San Francisco, who was a coauthor of both studies. Currently, no treatment can halt or reverse Alzheimer’s-related brain damage.
Other researchers say that caution is warranted in interpreting the results. The lab studies on mice create “an artificial situation” that might not be relevant to human disease, says neurologist and neuropathologist Thomas Wisniewski of New York University’s medical school.