Alzheimer’s disease usually begins with small memory problems that the patient may even devalue and then progresses slowly with signs that may not be entirely clear until an advanced stage. Being able to detect the disease as early as possible allows access to certain treatments and strategies that will help maintain normal functions for longer. A multidisciplinary team from Coimbra took another step in this direction, according to the scientific journal Nature Communications.
What researchers from the University of Coimbra (UC) and the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (CHUC) wanted was to understand the role of inflammation in neurons and beta-amyloid (whose plaques deposited in the brain are associated with the disease ) in certain processes such as the activation of microglia (immune defense cells of the nervous system) or the alteration of the functioning of brain activity in memory tasks.
The overactivation of microglia, that is, the increase in the production of these immune cells, is associated with some neurodegenerative diseases and even psychiatric disorders and was also observed in this research by the Coimbra team. When they compared patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s and people with similar physical and social characteristics (but without disease), they found that microglia activation appeared to be more closely related to brain activity in the patients than beta-amyloid.
Secondly, reducing microglia activation could restore normal brain activityaccording to the hypothesis proposed by the team coordinated by Miguel Castelo-Branco (UC) and Isabel Santana (CHUC).
The team focused on a particular region of the brain, the posterior cingulate, which is known to have high communication activity between neurons, to be associated with memory and learning, and to be one of the sites with the highest accumulation of beta-amyloid in this disease. . And he combined positron emission tomography (PET) images, used in nuclear medicine to detect neuroinflammation and beta-amyloid, with functional magnetic resonance imaging, while stimulating the brain activity of people undergoing the exam.
We found that activation of microglia in the posterior cingulate cortex was associated with increased brain activity in Alzheimer’s patients and was independent of amyloid accumulation,” the authors wrote in the article.
For the researchers, the results obtained show that it is not about the accumulation of beta-amyloid, in this case, to compromise normal brain function, but that the relationship will be with neuroinflammation. So neuroinflammation could cause changes in brain activity or, conversely, changes in brain function could cause inflammation, they say.
Source: Observadora
