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A brand new drug has been developed against Alzheimer's disease
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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Alzheimer's disease, the sixth-deadliest disease in the world, is the most common cause of dementia. In the United States alone, Alzheimer's is slowly but surely killing at least 5.4 million people.
A study conducted at the University of Georgia Health Sciences (USA) under the direction of Erhard Beiberich showed the following: when neurons begin to produce too much amyloid protein, which is the black mark of Alzheimer's disease, astrocytes, which normally support and protect neurons, begin to send them "letters of death."
On the right is a healthy brain, on the left is a terminal stage of Alzheimer's disease.
Amyloid proteins are secreted by all neurons, but the rate of secretion increases with age, reaching a maximum during illness. Astrocytes, whose main task is to deliver oxygen and other nutrients, as well as to remove some of the waste products of neural activity, are activated and inflamed under the influence of excess amyloids.
What would you do, reader, if a neuron produced something very toxic and dropped it at your door? You would probably choose to protect yourself from this mess somehow. And that's true. As the study showed, this is exactly what astrocytes in trouble do - they protect themselves by expressing a deadly pair of proteins, PAR-4, and the sphingolipid ceramide (which apparently serves only as a shell for PAR-4) and sending them as a "letter of death" to the neuron. As a result, PAR-4 induces apoptosis in both cells - the neuron and the panicking astrocyte, which explains the phenomenon of brain cell death observed in Alzheimer's disease.
Don't you think that thanks to this study, the puzzle finally fits together? Amyloid does not cause brain cells to die: the brain kills itself; amyloid merely activates the astrocyte's defense reaction, which releases deadly proteins in the direction of the offending neuron, causing the neuron to die first, and then the astrocyte itself to die. What a ridiculous suicide...
It seems that we now have hope for the development of a completely new drug: the authors of the work believe that if it were possible to destroy the deadly message sent by the astrocyte to the neuron, this would save humanity from senile dementia.
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