Alzheimer’s Researchers Find New Culprit and Potential Treatment Target for Disease

Participants in the study had their memory and thinking ability assessed through a series of tasks and tests, resulting in measures of cognitive function and a “clinical dementia rating score.” Individuals diagnosed with disorders that might account for cognitive impairment were excluded. The researchers used neuroimaging and cerebral spinal fluid analysis to measure the permeability, or leakiness, of capillaries serving the brain’s hippocampus, and found a strong correlation between impairment and leakage.

“The results were really kind of eye-opening,” said first author Daniel Nation, an assistant professor of psychology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “It didn’t matter whether people had amyloid or tau pathology; they still had cognitive impairment.”

The researchers cautioned that their findings represent a snapshot in time. In future studies, they hope to get a better sense of how soon cognitive problems occur after blood vessel damage appears. Zlokovic said it’s unlikely that scientists will soon abandon amyloid and tau as Alzheimer’s biomarkers, “but we should be adding some vascular biomarkers to our toolkit.”

Contacts and sources:
 Leigh Hopper
University of Southern California

Citation: Blood–brain barrier breakdown is an early biomarker of human cognitive dysfunction.
Daniel A. Nation, Melanie D. Sweeney, Axel Montagne, Abhay P. Sagare, Lina M. D’Orazio, Maricarmen Pachicano, Farshid Sepehrband, Amy R. Nelson, David P. Buennagel, Michael G. Harrington, Tammie L. S. Benzinger, Anne M. Fagan, John M. Ringman, Lon S. Schneider, John C. Morris, Helena C. Chui, Meng Law, Arthur W. Toga, Berislav V. Zlokovic. Nature Medicine, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41591-018-0297-y