Camelia Bhattacharyya, Amity University Kolkata
Memories, something we all look back to; it holds stories of joy, happiness, pain and all the firsts in life. Thus, memories are special, and they are the most prized possession. But what if these memories are lost along with the loss of proper functioning of the brain and the body and a lack of coordination between them? It will be a loss-loss situation, right? Well, in that case, the information that certain neuronal diseases do the same might come as a surprise. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of them. It is a result of neurodegeneration leading towards the loss of proper brain-body coordination and the loss of memory as well. What if this disease is diagnosed at a very early stage? It will surely help a patient to be healthier (through early medical care) than the one diagnosed with AD in a later stage. Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet have come up with a technique to identify the disease at an early stage, thus helping in the treatment of the patients concerned, about 10-20 years before there are clinical symptoms of cognitive dysfunction.
In the recent research mentioned, the homeostatic cells, Astrocytes are traced by position emission tomography (PET). The purpose being, reactive Astrocytosis (or Astrogliosis) due to neuronal destruction in the central nervous system (CNS) caused by AD, which is seen as soon as the first onset of neurodegeneration leading to AD. BU99008 was used as a ligand in the study to mark the imidazoline-2 binding sites (I2BS) expressing astrocytes through PET, and the result was highly accurate, thus telling the victory of the experimentation.
AD is a disease concerning about 47 million patients and their families. Once this disease enters a family, it not only damages the lifestyle of the one with it but also the happiness of the family as a whole. Nothing stays normal after the disease. So, the newly studied technique can be used for further studies of the disease which might someday lead to a permanent cure of it, or help doctors to treat patients in a better way to reduce future complications before the former is done.
Also read: New Study Finds the Importance of Landscapes in Rewilding
Source:
- Kumar, A., Koistinen, N.A., Malarte, ML. et al. Astroglial tracer BU99008 detects multiple binding sites in Alzheimer’s disease brain. Mol Psychiatry (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-021-01101-5
- https://news.ki.se/possible-new-pet-tracer-for-early-detection-of-alzheimers
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