Thinking could be harmful to people with brain diseases

Dr Harris A Gelbard, professor of neurology and principal investigator of the study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, has been researching the brain circuitry that goes awry in these. He followed the destruction occurring before hand when cells were trying to communicate.

Gelbard and Matt Bellizzi saw a disturbing behaviour in dendrites that conduct impulses from one cell to another. Dendrites have spines sprouting out like twigs, and at the end is a synapse which is used to communicate. They saw that the dendrites in a damaged brain were creating a foxhole and disappearing, or beading. The synapse couldn8217;t function properly. They realised that the beading was associated with functional deficits in the cell. When inflammation wasn8217;t present, normal cell-to-cell communication flowed. This dendritic beading has also been observed in the brains of animals with Alzheimer8217;s.AIDS brains had the same beading.

Once Gelbard realised that inflammation was at the heart of this process, he tested drugs to quiet this abnormal immune response. And it worked. Pretreating with a medicine normally used in emergency rooms to treat severe hypertension, Gelbard found that it prevented beading.

8216;8216;It has to get to the right place and in the right dose, but you can do almost anything to neurons and they won8217;t die.8217;8217; He believes that this approach could be used in early stages of dementia to strengthen vulnerable cells. 8212;LAT-WP