Latest Neurofibrillary tangle Stories

Potential to identify at-risk individuals may open the door for preventive therapiesResearchers using two brain-imaging technologies have found that apparently normal older individuals with brain deposits of amyloid beta "“ the primary constituent of the plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients "“ also had changes in brain structure similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients. Results of the study, which has received early online publication in the Annals of...

Max Planck study raises hopes for the development of effective therapies Amyloid-beta and tau protein deposits in the brain are characteristic features of Alzheimer disease. The effect on the hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a central role in learning and memory, is particularly severe. However, it appears that the toxic effect of tau protein is largely eliminated when the corresponding tau gene is switched off. Researchers from the Max Planck Research Unit for Structural...

Study in mice indicates disease's underlying causes and finds compounds that normalize the Alzheimer's brainA Blanchette Rockefeller Neurosciences Institute (BRNI) study published today in the Journal of Neuroscience reveals underlying causes for the degeneration of synapses in Alzheimer's Disease and identifies promising pharmaceutical solutions for the devastating condition that affects more than 5 million people in the United States. The BRNI study is the first to achieve fundamental...

Study suggests memory-destroying tau tangles proliferate when Hsp27 regulation is compromisedDynamic regulation of the chaperone protein Hsp27 was required to get rid of abnormally accumulating tau in the brains of mice genetically modified to develop the memory-choking tau tangles associated with Alzheimer's disease, a University of South Florida-led study found.Researchers at the USF Health Byrd Alzheimer's Institute demonstrated that the effective switching of Hsp27 between its active and...

Research from the Laboratory of Psychiatry and Experimental Alzheimers Research (http://www2.i-med.ac.at/psychlab/) at the Medical University Innsbruck (Austria) demonstrated that chronic high fat cholesterol diet in rats exhibited pathologies similar to Alzheimer's disease. The results were published in Molecular Cellular Neuroscience (45(4):408-417, 2010) with lead author Dr. Christian Humpel. The study was co-authored by PhD students, Celine Ullrich and Michael Pirchl, from the same...

A new study uncovers a protein modification that may contribute to the formation of neuron-damaging neurofibrillary tangles in the human brain. The research, published by Cell Press in the September 23 issue of the journal Neuron, may lead to new strategies for treatment of neurodegenerative diseases that result from pathological aggregation of tau protein.Tau protein is common in the central nervous system where it helps to stabilize microtubules that form the neuronal cytoskeleton. Tau...

By Jim Dryden, Washington University in St. LouisAn international team of Alzheimer's disease experts, led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has uncovered a gene variation that appears to predict the rate at which Alzheimer's disease will progress.The investigators report their findings online in the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Genetics.Whereas previous studies have focused on factors that influence the risk for Alzheimer's, the new research points to a...

- Two Target Tau; Two May Reduce Tau Though Their Target Was Amyloid - HONOLULU, July 13 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The primary therapeutic target in Alzheimer's disease has been the beta amyloid peptide, which clusters outside cells in the brain to form sticky clumps known as plaques. Recently, more attention has been given to the tau protein, which aggregates inside the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's, forming neurofibrillary tangles. Precisely how these proteins interact in...

TGen-led team finds 3 proteins that dismantle 'bridges' within brain cellsA scientific group led by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) have identified three kinases, or proteins, that dismantle connections within brain cells, which may lead to memory loss associated with Alzheimer's disease.These findings, the results of a multi-year TGen study, are published in this month's edition of BMC Genomics in a paper titled: High-content siRNA screening of the kinome identifies...

Protein reduces levels of amyloid beta and tau hyperphosphorylation, 2 hallmarks of Alzheimer'sInvestigators at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham) and colleagues have identified a novel mouse gene (Rps23r1) that reduces the accumulation of two toxic proteins that are major players in Alzheimer's disease: amyloid beta and tau. The amyloid and tau lowering functions of this gene were demonstrated in both human and mouse cells. Amyloid beta is responsible for the plaques found in...