A new study has found that Alzheimer’s disease could potentially be accelerated by bone marrow transplants from donors with the disease.
On Thursday, a group of researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada published a study in a scientific journal Stem Cell Reports who found that lab mice that received bone marrow transplants from other mice that had a protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease experienced rapid cognitive decline.
The researchers say the study could help scientists begin to determine exactly what contributes to Alzheimer’s disease and other types of cognitive decline — especially since so much is unknown about Alzheimer’s, including whether it is caused by the brain or by genetic or environmental factors.
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“This supports the idea that Alzheimer’s is a systemic disease in which amyloids expressed outside the brain contribute to central nervous system pathology,” Wilfred Jefferies, an immunologist and study author, told Neuroscience News.
“While we continue to investigate this mechanism, Alzheimer’s disease may be the tip of the iceberg and we need to have far better control and screening of donors used in blood, organ and tissue transplants, as well as in the transfer of human origin. cells or blood products,” Jefferies added. In the study, the researchers used both healthy mice and mice showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease, and transplanted bone marrow from mice with an inherited form of Alzheimer’s disease. The healthy mice began to develop signs of Alzheimer’s disease at the age of 9 months, and mice that already had the Alzheimer’s protein began to experience cognitive decline at 6 months of age.
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“The fact that we could see significant differences in behavior and cognitive decline in APP-knockouts at 6 months was surprising, but also intriguing because it only showed the onset of disease accelerated after transfer,” the study’s first author, Chaahat Singh, told Neuroscience News.
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Researchers at the University of British Columbia wrote that bone marrow and other medical donors should be screened for Alzheimer’s before they can be transfused.
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However, several other scientists who spoke to Medscape cautioned that the risk of a person getting Alzheimer’s disease through a bone marrow or stem cell transplant is very low.
Paul Morgan, a dementia researcher at Cardiff University in the UK, told Science that the study involved a “very specific experimental situation” and that it was a “huge leap” to say there was a significant risk of Alzheimer’s spreading in humans through transplants.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education