Researchers Spot Alzheimer's Protein in Young Brains for the First Time

A study, recently published in the journal Brain, has revealed that a key hallmark of the Alzheimer's disease, the accumulation of an abnormal protein in the brain, can begin in people aged 20 years old, which is much younger than scientists have ever imagined.

The study has given the details about how accumulation of the protein amyloid can come up as a strong signal for the people who are at a greater risk for developing the neural degenerative disease.

In a statement, Changiz Geula, a researcher at the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center at Northwestern University, lead investigator, said that it was well known that amyloid accumulates and leads to the formation of clumps of plaque outside neurons in aging adults and in Alzheimer's patients. But the latest discovery that that amyloid begins to accumulate so early in life is extraordinary.

Geula and his colleagues looked at basal neurons in the forebrain called cholinergic cells in particular, as they are often the first to die in both normal ageing and Alzheimer's patients and made the discovery.
While tied to memory and attention, researchers only motive was to know the reason that was making them so vulnerable.

The data for the study was collected from three groups of dead people whose brains were analyzed. The groups included 13 people aged 20-66 who were mentally healthy at the time of their death, 16 people 70 to 99-year-olds who did not have dementia when they died, and 21 people aged 60-95 who had Alzheimer's disease at the time of their death.

The researchers noticed that harmful protein accumulates even in 20-year-old brains, and amyloid clumps size grew notably larger in the older Alzheimer's brains.

Geula said that the discovery is very significant. He added, "We know that amyloid, when present for long periods of time, is bad for you... The lifelong accumulation of amyloid in these neurons likely contributes to the vulnerability of these cells to pathology in aging and loss in Alzheimer's”.