Cell-stopping Revelation

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a type of dementia mainly affecting the elderly, its symptoms worsening over time. There’s currently no drug available to treat AD, and a need to better understand the disease itself. Microglia (shown in green and red), which are specialised immune cells of the brain, have been linked to the disease. A build-up of these cells causes inflammation in the brain. Now research has shown that samples from people who had AD have more microglia than samples from people who died without AD. And the more microglia were present, the more severe the AD. The team treated mice with AD characteristics with a drug that stops microglia from accumulating in their brains. They tested these AD mice before and after giving them the drug and found not only that after treatment their memory was better, but also that communication between neurons appeared to have been restored.

Written by Katerina Papadopoulou

Katerina Papadopoulou

Writer

Currently a research associate at UCL, Kat is a molecular neuroscientist who studies neurodegenerative disorders. She specialises in post-transcriptional gene regulation. She enjoys communicating science to different audiences.

• Image by Simon Beggs, courtesy of the Wellcome Image Library
• Centre for Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Research published in Brain, January 2016