Shots - Health Blog Gene Mutation Offers Clue For Drugs To Stave
Off Alzheimer's Originally published on Thu July 12, 2012 4:03
pm Finally, there's some good news about Alzheimer's disease. It
turns out that a few lucky people carry a genetic mutation that
greatly reduces their risk of getting the disease, an Icelandic
team reports in the journal Nature. The mutation also seems to
protect people who don't have Alzheimer's disease from the
cognitive decline that typically occurs with age. The mutation
is very rare, but its discovery is generating fresh optimism
about experimental drugs that act on the same system in the
brain. "I'm very excited by it," says Robert Vassar of
Northwestern University, who has spent much of his career
studying the process that causes plaques to form in the brains
of people with Alzheimer's. Those plaques are made of a
substance called amyloid beta. The mutation discovered by the
Icelandic researchers alters a gene that affects production of
amyloid beta. A study of the genomes of