Your brain pH can make you prone to Alzheimer’s

As we age, losing our memory becomes more and more of a concern for each and every one of us. After all, who hasn’t known someone — a friend, a relative or a co-worker whose life had been ravaged by a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. You can’t help but wonder, “Am I next?” Part of what makes the disease so scary is not just that it strips away your life memory by memory. But that, by the time it’s diagnosed, most of the neurological damage is done. And, to top it off, the medical community has found no cure and no drugs that can prevent or reverse the symptoms of the devastating disease. They’ve not even really understood what sets off the disease in the first place… Until now. Is your brain too acidic? A study by scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is changing all that with a new discovery. It all started nearly 20 years ago when research revealed that that endosomes, little circular compartments that ferry cargo back and forth within cells, are larger and far more abundant in the brain cells of people destined to develop Alzheimer’s disease. This small clue made the scientist wonder whether an underlying problem with endosomes could lead to an accumulation of amyloid protein in spaces around neurons. You see, in order to shuttle their cargo from place to place, those endosomes have to have chaperones. In this case, proteins that bind to the cargo and bring them to and from the cell’s surface. And, the scientists discovered that it is that binding that holds the key… After examining the brain tissue samples of healthy people in comparison to the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, as well as the brains of mice bred to express the Alzheimer’s gene they […]

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