Thursday, October 27, 2022

Drink to Your Health to Neutralize Alzheimer's Amyloid

Wine and tea
Extracts from wine and green tea can reshape the amyloid proteins behind Alzheimer's. Learn how these natural chemicals may use this ability to disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer’s disease pathway.



Natural chemicals found in green tea and red wine may disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer's disease pathway, according to new research from the University of Leeds.

In early-stage laboratory experiments, the researchers identified the process which allows harmful clumps of protein to latch on to brain cells, causing them to die. They were able to interrupt this pathway using the purified extracts of EGCG from green tea and resveratrol from red wine.

The findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, offer potential new targets for developing drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, which affects some 800,000 people in the UK alone, and for which there is currently no cure.

“This is an important step in increasing our understanding of the cause and progression of Alzheimer’s disease,” says lead researcher Professor Nigel Hooper of the University’s Faculty of Biological Sciences. “It’s a misconception that Alzheimer’s is a natural part of ageing; it’s a disease that we believe can ultimately be cured through finding new opportunities for drug targets like this.”

Alzheimer’s disease is characterised by a distinct build-up of amyloid protein in the brain, which clumps together to form toxic, sticky balls of varying shapes. These amyloid balls  latch on to the surface of nerve cells in the brain by attaching to proteins on the cell surface called prions, causing the nerve cells to malfunction and eventually die.

“We wanted to investigate whether the precise shape of the amyloid balls is essential for them to attach to the prion receptors, like the way a baseball fits snugly into its glove,” says co-author Dr Jo Rushworth. “And if so, we wanted to see if we could prevent the amyloid balls binding to prion by altering their shape, as this would stop the cells from dying.”

The team formed amyloid balls in a test tube and added them to human and animal brain cells. Professor Hooper said: “When we added the extracts from red wine and green tea, which recent research has shown to re-shape amyloid proteins, the amyloid balls no longer harmed the nerve cells. We saw that this was because their shape was distorted, so they could no longer bind to prion and disrupt cell function.

“We also showed, for the first time, that when amyloid balls stick to prion, it triggers the production of even more amyloid, in a deadly vicious cycle,” he added.

Professor Hooper says that the team’s next steps are to understand exactly how the amyloid-prion interaction kills off neurons. “I’m certain that this will increase our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease even further, with the potential to reveal yet more drug targets,” he said.


MORE INFORMATION:
The research was funded by the Wellcome Trust, Alzheimer’s Research UK and the Medical Research Council.

The Full Paper:  Jo V. Rushworth, Heledd H. Griffiths, Nicole T. Watt and Nigel M. Hooper, ‘Prion protein-mediated neurotoxity of amyloid-β oligomers requires lipid rafts and the transmembrane LRP1,’ Journal of Biological Chemistry [DOI:10.1074/jbc.M112.400358] is available at http://www.jbc.org/content/early/2013/02/05/jbc.M112.400358.full.pdf+html

3 comments:

  1. How could this information be applied today. Is it as simple as drinking wine and green tes as a preventative? I'd also like to know if this would apply to other known dementias or only AD.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's hard to say for sure. However, if the researchers were using extracts of red wine and green tea, it implies that they bothered to use extracts because they wanted a more concentrated or targeted effect. So we probably would not get as strong a benefit from just drinking the tea or wine, but at the same time, it seems likely that doing so would be a step in the right direction.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The wine is simply fermented drink from grapes. Yep, call it probiotic! And it's well known that all probiotics are restoring natural balance in guts and improving immunity.
    To your health!

    ReplyDelete

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