Creating therapies for Alzheimer's disease by targeting neural circuits
Age-related dementia will affect 10 percent of people in the U.S. within their lifetime. Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent type of dementia — and one for which there is no effective treatment or cure — causes a progressive and devastating loss of memory and cognition. For the past 25 years, efforts to develop a treatment for the disease have focused on the so-called “amyloid cascade hypothesis.” This proposes that amyloid-β (Aβ) peptides build up and clump together to form plaques in the brain, creating a cascade effect that ultimately leads to neuronal death and cognitive dysfunction. However, despite evidence of a link between amyloid-β and Alzheimer’s disease, efforts to target the peptide have so far failed to reverse this cognitive decline. Now, in a review paper published in the journal Nature, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT argue that while elevated amyloid-β levels may initiate the sequence of events that...