Does neuroinflammation contribute to Alzheimer's disease?

"Nature-Medical" magazine recently published a new study on Alzheimer's disease, suggesting that neuroinflammation is the main factor that leads to the spread of key pathological proteins in the brain and drives the development of cognitive impairment
.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine used real-time imaging to find evidence in the brains of living patients for the first time, showing that neuroinflammation is not just a consequence of disease progression, but a key upstream mechanism of disease development
.

Neuroinflammation is a major feature of the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease
.

Previously, researchers have obtained a lot of evidence from cells and animals cultured in the laboratory, showing that the activation of microglia promotes the spread of tau protein fibrillary tangles, and the tau protein fibrillary tangles formed in nerve cells are Alzheimer's disease One of the key pathological features
.

This study further examined the relationship between the activation of microglia in the human brain and the spread of tau protein throughout the cerebral cortex and the occurrence of cognitive impairment
.

Researchers used positron emission tomography brain imaging to analyze the brains of 130 elderly patients of different ages and at different stages of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as the brains of healthy elderly people, and examined their microglia activation, two key points Pathological protein β-amyloid deposition and tau protein tangles
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They observed that neuroinflammation is more common in older older adults, and is more pronounced in patients with mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease-related dementia
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▲The degree of neuroinflammation in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease is higher than that in healthy elderly people (picture source: reference [2]; Credit: Adapted from Pascoal et al.
, Nature Medicine)

A number of bioinformatics analyses have shown that the diffusion path of tau protein depends on the activation of microglia-the latter is a key factor that links the effect of beta amyloid deposit plaques with the spread of tau protein and cognitive impairment
.

The researchers pointed out that targeting neuroinflammation for treatment will benefit patients with early Alzheimer's disease, and may help delay or even reverse the accumulation of pathological tau protein and avoid disease progression

Reference materials:

[1] Tharick A.

[2] Brain tissue inflammation is key to Alzheimer's disease progression.