The material, a protein called beta amyloid, or A-beta, piles up into tough plaques that destroy signals between nerves. When that happens, people lose their memory, their personality changes and they stop recognizing friends and family.
But now researchers at Harvard suggest that the protein has a real and unexpected function — it may be part of the brain’s normal defenses against invading bacteria and other microbes.
Other Alzheimer’s researchers say the findings, reported in the current issue of the journal PLoS One, are intriguing, though it is not clear whether they will lead to new ways of preventing or treating the disease.
The new hypothesis got its start late one Friday evening in the summer of 2007 in a laboratory at Harvard Medical School. The lead researcher, Rudolph E. Tanzi, a neurology professor who is also director of the genetics and aging unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, said he had been looking at a list of genes that seemed to be associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
To his surprise, many looked just like genes associated with the so-called innate immune system, a set of proteins the body uses to fight infections. The system is particularly important in the brain, because antibodies cannot get through the blood-brain barrier, the membrane that protects the brain. When the brain is infected, it relies on the innate immune system to protect it.
