Alzheimer’s disease wreaks unmistakable havoc in the brain.
If you compare the brain of someone who has died from neurodegenerative disease to that of a healthy person, you can’t miss the difference: In the case of severe Alzheimer’s, the brain will be noticeably smaller, with large gaps where pieces would normally nestle close together.
This shrinkage, termed brain atrophy, is due to the die-off of neurons and their connections across the entire cortex, the wrinkled, outermost shell of the brain. Nobody knows what triggers these huge brain changes in Alzheimer’s disease, let alone how to stop or reverse them.
But neuroscientists at the Allen Institute and their collaborators are focusing on changes at a much smaller, granular scale, hoping to provide incredibly detailed insight into what exactly goes wrong in Alzheimer’s disease. They’ve just publicly released some of the first data showing the specific types of neurons and other brain cells that die off or otherwise change in Alzheimer’s disease, using cutting-edge techniques to categorize individual cells based on what their genes do. This approach could ultimately identify new targets for better therapies to slow or halt the disease’s progression by preventing these specific cell populations from dying.
