WNDU: Medical Moment: Restoring missing protein to treat Alzheimer’s

UC’s Alberto Espay re-examines the course of Alzheimer’s treatment.

Alberto Espay, MD, MSc, professor of neurology and rehabilitative medicine and member of the UC Gardner Neuroscience Institute, is leading Alzheimer’s research in collaboration between UC and the renown Karolinska Institute in Sweden. 

headshot of Alberto Espay

Alberto Espay, MD, MSc, professor of neurology and rehabilitative medicine at the UC College of Medicine and Director and Endowed Chair of the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Family Center for Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders.

Espay's study, featured in the nationally syndicated Medical Moment, has continued to garner media coverage since the findings were published in early 2021. 

This research contends that diminished levels of a certain brain fluid protein, called soluble amyloid peptide, contributes to Alzheimer’s dementia and not clumps, called amyloid plaques, that result when the fluid drops. 

Espays team compared the brain fluid levels of 600 Alzheimer’s individuals with clumps on their brains and found no cognitive impairment in those who had higher levels of the brain fluid protein. 

“We (researchers) have been going with the narrative,” that the clumps cause the dementia, when they do not, says Espay. 

Watch the Medial Moment interview 

Featured image at top courtesy of Unsplash.

Read The Financial Times article, which has been reprinted in several international news outlets, including Kenya News.

The research study also appears in media outlets below :

Neuroscience Today: Prevailing Alzheimer’s theory in question with new discovery

MD India: New discovery sheds light on the pitfalls of Alzheimer’s theory

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