Hoag Hospital Newport Beach and University of California-Irvine say they are making progress in research for a cure and ways to prevent the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
UCI headlined a July 31 article: “Call it Mighty Mouse: Breakthrough leaps Alzheimer’s research hurdle.”
Researchers from the school “have made it possible to learn how key human brain cells respond to Alzheimer’s, vaulting a major obstacle in the quest to understand and one day vanquish it,” the article said.
Meanwhile, Hoag researchers said they have compelling data from its Orange County Vital Brain Aging Program that shows the benefit of early detection to stave off cognitive impairment and the dementia of Alzheimer’s disease.
“What you do in your mid-age affects what happens in your brain in your 70s and 80s,” said William R. Shankle, director of the Memory and Cognitive Disorders program at the Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute at Hoag, in a July 19 statement.
“This [data] represents a shifting attention from Alzheimer’s chronic care to prevention,” he said.
The researchers presented at this year’s Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, the largest and most influential annual meeting dedicated to the subject.
About 44 million people suffer worldwide from Alzheimer’s disease, including 5.8 million in the U.S., where about 200,000 new cases are diagnosed annually.
UCI’s Microglia
Mathew Blurton-Jones, who is an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior at UCI and a member of the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center, led a team that recently published its work in the scientific journal Neuron.
They spent four years developing a new rodent model that contains two sets of DNA. They said the model was “Chimeric,” a mythical Greek monster that was part goat, lion and serpent, or in modern scientific terms, has two or more complete sets of DNA.
“The rodent, completely unaware of its role in scientific breakthroughs, has also become a once-mythological Chimera in the process of assisting science,” UCI said.
The researchers injected the human cells of adult patients into the mice. Researchers then coaxed the mouse into developing microglia, which function like microphages.
Examining the rodent several months later, the scientists found about 80% of the microglia in the mice’s brains was human.
“Microglia are now seen as having a crucial role in the development and progression of Alzheimer’s,” Blurton-Jones said.
“The functions of our cells are influenced by which genes are turned on or off. Recent research has identified over 40 different genes with links to Alzheimer’s and the majority of these are switched on in microglia. However, so far we’ve only been able to study human microglia at the end stage of Alzheimer’s in post-mortem tissues or in petri dishes.”
The specialized mouse will allow researchers to better mimic the human condition during different phases of Alzheimer’s while performing experiments, said Jonathan Hasselmann, one of the two neurobiology graduate students involved in the study.
Hoag’s Research
Junko Hara, program manager at the Hoag Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute, and her team, led by Dr. William Shankle, are looking into not just treatment, but preventing the switch from ever being “clicked” on.
“We’ve seen younger people taking part in the assessments because they are interested in prevention and want to take action,” Shankle said. “They have seen their parents’ or their grandparents’ decline, and they are scared. The stigma of Alzheimer’s is going away gradually. They are ready to do something.”
Hoag offers patients free access to the Orange County Vital Brain Aging Program.
“We do a lot of workshops—primary care physicians, their role in managing community health is more than the patient,” Hara said.
Dementia isn’t a disease, but rather a collection of symptoms signifying a certain cognitive impairment, Hara said. “Dementia is a symptom but there are many types,” Hara said, naming Parkinson’s, stroke, and Alzheimer’s as examples.
There is no “mild” form of dementia—any form of cognitive impairment is impactful, Hara said.
Hoag’s data found that primary care physicians were often not well informed enough to help. About 24% of all participants in the Hoag study were found to be impaired, meaning that their conditions had gone unnoticed by their physicians.
Either physicians would say “don’t worry, you’re just getting old” or patients never raised their concerns to their doctors, according to the report.
The reality is that you don’t lose your memory as you age—that’s a myth; the brain is constantly engaged in neurogenesis, or the formation of new neurons, Hara said.
And when it comes to brain training games, “There is no way to know how much benefit it has—but there is not no benefit,” Hara said. “The brain is like a muscle. Use it or lose it.”
