A multidisciplinary team of scientists from the University of Coimbra (UC) and the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra (CHUC), coordinated by Miguel Castelo-Branco (UC) and Isabel Santana (CHUC), have discovered a triple hotspot of brain pathology in the disease of Alzheimer's.
The discovery may have very relevant implications in terms of future therapies, as it clearly identifies a brain target of early alteration, implicated in memory loss, which can be studied directly and in a focused way in new therapeutic trials.
Miguel Castelo-Branco, researcher at the Faculty of Medicine and the Center for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health at the University of Coimbra, reveals that the discovery paves the way "for the development and testing of therapies aimed at reducing neuroinflammation in Alzheimer's disease".
The identified brain region is called the posterior cingulate and demonstrates, in very early stages of Alzheimer's disease, unique tripartite changes: neuronal inflammation, amyloid accumulation, and apparently compensatory neuronal activity. "The identified region is critical, as it serves as a pivot in short and long-term memory processes that we know are crucially affected in Alzheimer's disease", reiterates the researcher from the University of Coimbra.
This discovery in the human brain was demonstrated in vivo using a set of advanced functional and brain imaging techniques: dual PET (which measures neuroinflammation and amyloid deposition in the same patient) and functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity. in memory tasks. This study involved people in the very early stages of Alzheimer's disease and healthy people with the same sociodemographic characteristics.
The research also involved the involvement of Nádia Canário and Lília Jorge, first authors of the study, and Ricardo Martins, researchers at the Center for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health at UC.
The research results are available in the scientific article “Dual PET-fMRI reveals a link between neuroinflammation, amyloid binding and compensatory task-related brain activity in Alzheimer's disease”, now published in Communications Biology: www.nature.com/articles/s42003 -022-03761-7.
