To state the obvious: a diagnosis of either cancer or Alzheimer’s disease is something that no one wants to receive. However, researchers have found some evidence that cancer might contribute to lowering one’s risk of Alzheimer’s. It’s something that merits further study; if there’s a way to figure out the reason for this reduced risk without the accompanying cancer, it could go a long way towards helping people avoid dementia as they age.
A paper published earlier this month in the journal Cell took a deeper look at this phenomenon. As the paper’s authors phrased it, “whether and how peripheral cancer may affect [Alzheimer’s disease] progression is yet to be studied.” That led them to discover that cancer has an effect on the nervous system — something that could have a significant impact on future treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
As one of the paper’s authors, Youming Lu of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told Nature‘s Heidi Ledford, the scientists researching this discovered that, in mice, cancer resulted in mice not having brain plaques. As the researchers continued their work, they found that a type of protein created by cancer cells could traverse the blood-brain barrier. Once in the brain, these proteins drew the attention of immune cells, which reduced the amount of plaques there.
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It’s a big step foward in diagnosing the diseaseThe experts cited in the Nature article about the study noted that these findings could help in creating ways to treat or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done, including exploring this phenomenon in humans. But having more information about how Alzheimer’s works and how it can be prevented gets medical science that much closer to a functional treatment for the disease.
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