Alzheimer's disease has a range of disparate risk factors, but researchers may now have found one underlying cause that links them all: a lack of oxygen.
Previous studies have shown that diabetes, stroke, clogged arteries and ageing all increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Only 5% of cases appear to have been strongly influenced by genetic factors. Now evidence has emerged that lack of oxygen may be the ultimate cause.
Weihong Song at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues took mice engineered to develop Alzheimer’s-like plaques and put them in a hypoxia chamber, which limits the amount of available oxygen. For 16 hours per day, for one month, the mice received less than 40% of the oxygen they normally use.
Six months later, the oxygen-deprived mice had developed twice as many beta-amyloid plaques – the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease – compared with similar mice kept in normal conditions. The hypoxic mice also performed worse on memory tests.
I guess it would account for why exercise helps prevent it too?
No comments:
Post a Comment