"The timely elimination of pathological changes in the brain - the so-called beta-amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease - can stop and even reverse the course of this serious disease that irreversibly deprives the person of his mental abilities," says a study published in the journal Neuron ".

"We hope to develop within 5-10 years effective methods of treatment of Alzheimer's disease, this severe variety of senile dementia, which has turned into a serious social and medical problem", said the neuroscientist Professor from the University of California in Los Angeles, Frank LaFerla.. Now this disease in the US alone affects about 5 million. People, and the number of them due to the general aging of the population is growing rapidly, according to an online edition for girls and women from 14 to 35 years old Pannochka.

Net Specialists suggest that it is the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain that promotes the progress of the disease and causes a cascade of events ultimately leading to dementia. "We found," said Dr. LaFerla, "that cleaning the brain of plaques weakens the symptoms of the disease and even reverses its course in the early stages". The researchers showed this in experiments on genetically modified mice, which they specifically deduced for this purpose. The fact is that ordinary mice do not develop Alzheimer's disease, so that in order to model the disease, their genome must first introduce specific human genes.

Medicus. En.