Do you know what kind of microscopic changes occurs that lead to Alzheimer’s disease? As per a recent study conducted by researchers, critical molecular biological pathways that drive changes in brain cells are mainly responsible to cause Alzheimer’s disease.
According to the study conducted by scientists published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, they found that most known biological pathways are linked with the disease.
These pathways are found to be closely linked to the disease are are quite associated with some biological mechanisms like depression, metabolism, and immune system. These attributes have not changed or the last 30 years, despite having a great technological advancements.
Alzheimer’s Disease Statistics
In United States, 6 million adults are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. And this number is expected to go double by the end of 2050.
Please note that the condition happens to be the 6th leading cause of deaths in the US.
It’s basically a complex neurodegenerative disease which is characterized by several symptoms like agitation, delusions, depression, poor judgment, confusion, memory loss that mainly takes away the ability of people to live their lives independently.
Winston A. Hide, PhD, who’s the director of Precision RNA medicine Core Facility at BIDMC said, “The burden of Alzheimer’s disease is steadily increasing, driving us towards a neurological epidemic,” he clarified.
In their study, the team of researchers performed a search of 206,324 pathway-specific dementia that were published since 1990. Afterwards, they chose to analyze 340 known biological pathways. And finally, they determined how many publications were actually linked to a given pathway of the disease.
Pathways in Alzheimer’s Disease
In their study, they found that as many as 91% biological pathways were directly linked to causing the above condition.
The data also suggested that half of these pathways were linked to Alzheimer’s disease in more than 100 scientific reports.
The team also spotted as many as 30 pathways that were most frequently consistent for the last 30 years.
And this suggested that most earlier studies were done covering only a small subset of disease causing pathways.
This is what they said, “Given that an unexpected diversity of pathways is associated with Alzheimer’s disease, a wide range of disease processes are not being successfully targeted in clinical trials. We hypothesize that comprehensively targeting more of the associated underlying mechanisms will increase the chances of success in future drug trials.” they stated.
Source: Medindia.net
