365Telugu.com Online News, December 15th, 2022: Scientists have finally solved the mystery of Alzheimer’s. Researchers have discovered the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. It has been found that why this problem occurs more in women.
“New research suggests that chemical modification of a part of the mating system may help Alzheimer’s. This may partly explain why the disease predominantly affects women,” said Sturt Lipton, who participated in the study.
Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia that occurs in old age. However, almost six million people in the United States are currently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
It is a life-threatening disease, with a risk of further complications occurring ten years after the onset of the problem.
There is currently no approved treatment available to stop the disease process, and a treatment for Alzheimer’s is still not available because scientists do not fully understand how it develops.
And scientists are not entirely sure why women account for almost two-thirds of the cases.
Lipton’s laboratory studies the biochemical and molecular events that underlie neurodegenerative diseases, including the chemical reaction of a modified type of complement C3–a process known as protein S-nitrosylation.
Lipton and his colleagues previously discovered this chemical reaction, in which a nitric oxide (NO)-related molecule binds tightly to a sulfur atom (S) on a specific amino acid building-block protein to form a modified “SNO-protein.” .
Protein modifications by small groups of molecules such as NO activate or inactivate normal target protein functions in cells.
For technical reasons, S-nitrosylation is more difficult to study than other protein modifications, but Lipton suspects that “SNO-storms” of these proteins may be a key contributor to Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative disorders.
For the new study, researchers used new methods to detect S-nitrosylation to quantify modified proteins in 40 postmortem human brains.
Half of the brains were collected from people who had died of Alzheimer’s, and half from people without Alzheimer’s, divided equally between males and females.
Scientists have known for over 30 years that Alzheimer’s brains have higher levels of complement proteins and other markers of inflammation compared to neurologically normal brains.
Recent research has specifically shown that complement proteins can stimulate brain-resident immune cells called microglia to destroy synapses through the connection points where neurons send signals to each other.
Many researchers now suspect that this synapse-destruction mechanism partially underlies the Alzheimer’s disease process. Loss of synapses leads to cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s brains. proved to have a significant relationship.