Word: proteins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most exciting papers. Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine reported, for example, that compared with other Alzheimer's patients, those who had diabetes and took insulin plus another anti-diabetes medication to control blood sugar had 80% fewer amyloid plaques - the sticky brain-clogging masses that, together with protein tangles, are the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. Although the mechanism wasn't entirely clear, researchers think the drugs may work by normalizing the brain's communication network of insulin receptors, which goes awry in the Alzheimer's brain, while clearing away the damaging plaques...
Compared with patients who never developed diabetes, patients who had the disease but took insulin along with one additional medication to control blood sugar (typically metformin or glyburide) had 80% fewer brain-clogging amyloid plaques in their brain. Build up of these protein plaques, which are one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease, can interfere with normal communication between nerve cells and cause deficits in memory and cognition. "The group on combination therapy had a very, very low load of neuritic plaques," Beeri says. "Their brains looked almost like normal people." The medications did not, however, do much...
...normalize the communication network of insulin receptors, which go awry in the Alzheimer's brain, somehow restoring those pathways to as close to normal as possible, while clearing out the damaging plaques that form when the network malfunctions. "Our hypothesis is that with the combination therapy, the gene and protein expression of these Alzheimer's patients might be close to that of normal people who don't have Alzheimer's at all," she says. Beeri stresses that it's far too early to recommend that patients showing early signs of Alzheimer's start to take insulin with metformin or glyburide...
...that front, at least, the British and American researchers may have good company. This week a separate team of researchers at the University of Texas announced they had found what may be the virus's "Achilles' heel" - a stretch of amino acids in the HIV envelope protein, which is necessary for the virus to attach to and infect host cells. Those amino acids, researchers say, could someday be a key therapeutic target and may help change the epidemic's course...
...encouraging finding: most of the genetic defects identified in the Middle Eastern families were not in the business part of the gene - the part that codes for a critical brain protein. Instead the defects lay mainly in adjacent regions that turn the gene fully or partially on and off. This suggests that certain therapies or drugs could help normalize the activity of these genes, according to Dr. Eric Morrow of Massachusetts General Hospital, one of the lead authors of the paper. In fact, Morrow suspects that early intervention programs for children with autism involving intensive instruction in speech and social...