By Eve Herold –
Often by the time AD patients display symptoms, it’s too late to benefit from treatment. The holy grail in treating Alzheimer’s is finding a way to not only arrest its relentless march but to reverse damage to neurons and synapses once it develops. And it may not be enough to clear away the gummy buildup of protein fragments in the brain, a frequent research target; what the world’s 55 million dementia patients desperately need is an intervention that actually improves their functionality. Now there’s big news on that front hailing from Japan. In an open access paper published in Brain, lead author Chia-Jung Chang describes a study introducing the synthetic peptide PHDP5 to transgenic mice developed to exhibit AD. The peptide crossed the blood-brain barrier and enhanced synaptic function, leading to improved memory performance. The research targeted the availability of the good protein dynamin, which in AD is vacuumed up by the rogue protein tau, with the peptide and restored the balance of microtubules, which are key to synaptic function. For AD patients and their loved ones, a delay of even a couple of years in the progression of the disease would be a Godsend. The study, led by Tomoyuki Takahashi at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, cites early intervention as key to the effectiveness of the treatment.
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