A discovery by researchers at McGill University and the Lady Davis Associate Research Institute for Medical Research at Montreal's Jewish Hospital opened new hopes for early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's.
In a study published in the May 15 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Dr. Hermant Paudel, a student of Mr. Dong Han and two postdoctoral fellows Hamid Qureshi and Yifan Lu reported that the Adding amino acids to a separate phosphorus in an important protein of the brain is the main cause of Alzheimer's disease. Finding this phosphate, one in two of these 12 molecules can help conduct early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and possibly in the future, leading to finding preventive drugs. disease attack.
This important protein called 'tau protein' is a normal component of the brain and central nervous system. But for Alzheimer's patients, these proteins go out of control and create chaos, along with degenerative patches that are the main cause of this neurodegenerative disease.
A few years ago, it was discovered that this protein in the brain of normal people consists of only 3 to 4 additional phosphates, while those in Alzheimer's patients are 21 to 25.
Dr. Paudel and his team discovered that due to the addition of a separate phosphate phosphate to Ser202 amino acid inside protein tau, the main culprit in Alzheimer's disease. 'The impact of this research is huge,' Paudel said. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a project manager at Lady Davis Center for Bloomfield Research Center . 'Now we can see the image of the brain in the early stages of the disease. We do not have to look for a variety of different types of phosphorus in protein, but just need to find this particular phosphorus. Thus, the possibility of early diagnosis is now feasible. '
'Second, the enzyme makes the interaction between phosphates and tau proteins can be treated by drugs. Since then the healing methods can be expanded. This is the first time a finding indicates a clear direction for early diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's disease. '
Dr. Paudel and his students have for years removed these types of phosphates that do not directly cause Alzheimer's symptoms. Eventually they succeeded in studying FTDP-17, a genetic disease that has symptoms similar to Alzheimer's but develops disease through mutations. By capturing these genetic mutations, they were able to demonstrate that the phosphates on Ser202 are almost certainly the only responsible responsible for the deformation of protein tau, causing both FTDP-17 and Alzheimer's disease.
This disease leads to serious mental deterioration and death is inevitable. So far there is no cure or even a reliable method to diagnose the disease early. In the United States, one patient is diagnosed with Alzheimer's every 70 seconds and the death rate has increased to a dizzying rate of 47 percent since 2000. When the number of people born in flare- ups Population explosion is getting older, this number is expected to rise many times over the coming decades.
In the US, there are more than 5.3 million people infected and in Canada more than 300,000. These patients face increasingly severe intellectual capacity decline and then almost certainly death without hope for cure. The American Alzheimer's Association has called this a crisis.