More Progress in Defeating Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. If we do not solve its mysteries, 13.5 million Americans are forecast to get the disease by 2050. What is less often talked about, is the impact on the families of the victims. For every person with the sickness, there are family members who suffer along with them, watching their loved ones decline and lose themselves as their brains get ravaged. The impact is therefore an order of magnitude higher.

The good news is that research into Alzheimer’s continues unabated. We see new research papers published just about every week, so there are a great many reasons to be optimistic. Progress, while slow, is there to be seen as with this latest report from Washington University in St. Louis.

Scientists have established a rough outline of one way in which Alzheimer’s disease takes hold, and bit by bit they are starting to fill in the detail. Key players in this process are what are known as amyloid beta proteins which form in clumps, evolve into plaques and cause irreversible damage to the brain. New research has revealed the crafty maneuver that these peptides use to slip past the cell’s defenses whereby they first change shape to form stacks of long, flat sheets, a finding that may offer up new opportunities to intervene in the onset of the disease.

More at New Atlas here: http://newatlas.com/stacks-peptides-alzheimers/45589/

More at Futurism.com here: http://futurism.com/we-just-moved-one-step-closer-to-understanding-and-defeating-alzheimers/

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