Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save Are certain regions of the brain more vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease? Though researchers can’t pinpoint why individuals have different presentations of the disease, one initial commonality is that most individuals experience short-term memory problems at the onset of the disease. It is unclear what causes certain brain regions to be affected first by the disease, while many other brain regions seemingly are still functioning normally. Yet, as Alzheimer’s disease progresses into the advanced stages, all affected individuals end up with widespread brain disease.
A team of molecular biologists and neuropathologists gathered from the University of California San Francisco Weill Institute for Neuroscience a few years ago to identify for the first time the neurons, or nerve cells, that are among the first victims of the disease — accumulating toxic “tangles” and dying off earlier than the neighboring cells. In a study published in Nature Neuroscience in January 2021, the researchers commented: “We know which neurons are first to die in other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease and ALS, but not Alzheimer’s,” said co-senior author Martin Kampmann, Ph.D.
, an associate professor in the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub investigator. “If we understood why these neurons are so vulnerable, maybe we could identify interventions that could make the.