Some people seem more. flexible Developing Alzheimer's disease despite having biological markers of the devastating disease. For obvious reasons, scientists are very fascinated with studying this particular group of individuals.
Alzheimer's disease, essentially the most common type of dementia, is attributable to the buildup of two proteins within the brain: amyloid and tau. Once these proteins accumulate, for reasons yet to be determined, they turn into toxic to brain cells (neurons) and these cells begin to die. As a result, people develop symptoms like memory loss since the brain can't function properly with all these dead neurons.
This cascade of events has been known for a few years and is how the disease progresses in most individuals with Alzheimer's. Most people, aside from a certain group who're more flexible. But why are they flexible?
A recent study within the journal Acta Neuropathologica Communications Researched whether our genes can influence how resilient we're to the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease when our brains have high levels of amyloid.
Scientists conducted a study on the brains of three groups of individuals. The first group consisted of people that had died of Alzheimer's disease. Others were healthy individuals who died of natural causes. And a 3rd included individuals who had high levels of the Alzheimer's protein of their brains but never developed symptoms of the disease during their lifetime – or not less than were never diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.
The last group, they considered resilient to Alzheimer's disease because that they had the protein of their brains but didn't have symptoms or a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease during their lifetime.
The scientists found that genes related to immune system activity gave the impression to be more energetic within the Alzheimer's resilient group. This would make sense since it is well established that the immune system helps clear excess proteins from the brain, so genes that help with this process may make us more resilient to developing disease symptoms.
How to be resilient – even if you happen to don't have the genes.
That's great if you happen to inherited these genes out of your parents, but what does that mean for the remainder of us who don't have them? Is there a way we will make ourselves more resilient to developing Alzheimer's disease no matter our genes?
“Yes” is the short answer.
There is now good scientific evidence that lifestyle changes and medications allow us to scale back the chance of Alzheimer's disease in the long run.
In particular, physical activity has been shown to scale back our risk of developing Alzheimer's, perhaps since it has a known useful effect on our immune system and due to this fact on those rogue proteins that accumulate in our brains. Helps to wash. This implies that being more physically energetic could have the identical effect on our Alzheimer's resilience because it does for those lucky enough to have the “right” genes.
Interestingly, we don't understand how physically energetic the people within the study were and the way that might need affected their susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease.
Ground Picture/Shutterstock
As is usually the case in science, it's unclear whether nature (genes) or nurture (lifestyle) contributed to their resilience. Another interesting aspect is that the resilient people within the study died of a cause aside from Alzheimer's disease, but could have developed Alzheimer's in the event that they had lived longer.