Research into Alzheimer's disease has focused on toxic proteins like amyloid-beta and tau, because that's what scientists have found when examining brains of patients after death. It's much more difficult to study patient's brains as the disease progresses. But research in mice has opened up a tantalizing new possibility.
We think of dopamine as the "pleasure chemical" that makes us feel good. Sure, but it also helps us to record memories in the brain. Dopamine is essential in the entorhinal cortex, where it serves as a gateway for encoding experiences into memory. In mice with an induced condition similar to Alzheimer's, scientists have found a deficit of dopamine in the entorhinal cortex. We don't yet know why this deficit occurs, but the introduction of dopamine helps to restore normal activity. This best part is that we have a drug already, Levodopa, that performs this task, and it's being used for Parkinson's disease. Read about this research and what it could mean at Neuroscience News. -via Damn Interesting
(Cropped image credit: Park SW, Jang HJ, Kim M, Kwag J)
Commenting on Neatorama will earn you NeatoPoints!