Brain plaques can cause Alzheimer’s: Study

While the first study suggests that autopsy of people with mental impairments found ‘amyloid brain plaques’ that lead to Alzheimer’s. The second study also found similar fact that the disease could be developed by healthy people having brain plaques.

The studies were made possible by Pittsburgh Compound B (PiB), an imaging agent that allows scientists to use positron emission tomography scans to detect amyloid plaques in living brains.

Details of Study 1
The first study carried out by Professor Martha Storandt from the University of Washington analyzed variety of factors in people with plaques and without plaques.

Martha Storandt states, “One of the main things we wanted to know was whether people who scanned positive for brain plaques scored abnormally low on cognitive tests.”

“They didn't, but when we looked at their annual testing records over a period of years, we saw that the scores of the plaque-positive group were declining, while those of the plaque-negative group were not.”

Findings of this study revealed that the brain areas hit hardest by Alzheimer's disease, such as the ‘parahippocampal gyrus’, were smaller in people who had plaques in their brain.

Details of Study 2
John C. Morris who is Director of Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) at the Washington University initiated this study that analyzed 159 healthy people in the age group of 51 to 88 for a period of four years from 2004-2008.

Analysis of the data revealed that out of these 23 showed signs of mild brain impairment and nine were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

“There are risks inherent in Alzheimer's treatments, so we have to be careful that healthy people who are selected to receive these treatments to prevent dementia caused by Alzheimer's disease really do have presymptomatic disease,” says John Morris.

More data needed to support the studies
Regardless of the promsisng outcomes of both the studies, the researchers feel that more research is needed to support the findings.

“We don't have enough data yet to definitively say that people who scan positive for these brain plaques have presymptomatic Alzheimer's disease, but something is clearly going on that does not bode well for the health of their aging brains,” concludes John Morris.

The researchers are contemplating that the findings will help establish a link between development of brain plaques with Alzheimer’s and can also help in finding new treatments and early diagnosis of the disease.

Both the studies have been published in this month’s edition of ‘Archives of Neurology’.