Maintaining the brain's wiring in aging and disease

EurskAlert
Contact: Dr. Claire Cockcroft
Researchers at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, supported by the Alzheimer's Research Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), have discovered that the brain's circuitry survives longer than previously thought in diseases of ageing such as Alzheimer's disease. The findings were published today in the journal Brain.

Alzheimer's disease and other dementias cause nerve cells in the brain to die, resulting in problems with memory, speech and understanding. Little is known about how the nerve cells die, but this new research has revealed how they first lose the ability to communicate with each other, before deteriorating further.

"We've all experienced how useless a computer is without broadband. The same is true for a nerve cell (neuron) in the brain whose wiring (axons and dendrites) has been lost or damaged," explained Dr Michael Coleman the project's lead researcher. "Once the routes of communication are permanently down, the neuron will never again contribute to learning and memory, because these 'wires' do not re-grow in the human brain."

But axons and dendrites are much....read the whole article

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