Early in life, the protein Reelin helps assemble the brain. Later on, it appears to protect the organ from Alzheimer’s and other threats to memory and thinking.
A key protein that helps assemble the brain early in life, also appears to protect the organ from Alzheimer’s and other diseases of aging.
This PET image shows the brain of a Colombian man whose memory and thinking remained intact in his late 60s, even though he carried a rare gene variant that nearly always causes Alzheimer's in a person's 40s.“They start with cognitive decline in their 40s, and they develop full-blown dementia late 40s or early 50s,” Arboleda-Velasquez says.
Scientists also found another sign of Alzheimer’s — tangled fibers called tau, which can impair neurons. But oddly, these tangles were mostly absent in a brain region called the entorhinal cortex, which is involved in memory.That’s important because this region is usually one of the first to be affected by Alzheimer’s, Arboleda-Velasquez says.
Although the research focused on a single person, it reverberated through the world of brain science and even got the attention of the acting director of the National Institutes of Health, Lawrence Tabak. “The neurons that are most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s neurodegeneration in the entorhinal cortex, they share one feature,” Tsai says: “They highly express Reelin.”With early Alzheimer's in the family, these sisters decided to test for the gene
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