More Evidence that Alzheimer's is A Type 3 Diabetes

Filed in archive Developments , Notable , Research on November 29, 2007

In a collaboration of neurobiologists at the Northwestern University came up with new evidence that Alzheimer's disease - a form of dementia - is a type 3 diabetes.

Wei-Qin Zhao came to Northwestern as a visiting professor who had shown in published research that insulin receptors in the brain play a critical role in learning and memory. There she met William Klein, professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center. He had recently identified the toxin that harms the brain in Alzheimer's, the first symptom of which is an inability to store new memories.

The two, along with professors Fernanda De Felice and Pascale Lacor and other colleagues, worked together to discover that this toxin does its damage by causing the brain to become insulin resistant. Just as Type 2 diabetes occurs when the body becomes insulin resistant, Alzheimer's would be a Type 3 diabetes.

This team studied healthy nerve cells from the brain's Hippocampus region, growing in culture dishes, and they observed abundant insulin receptors. "If you look closely at a high-resolution [image], you'll see that they are at synapses," Klein said. "Before we added the ADDLs [toxins], they all had insulin receptors." But with the toxin added to the culture dishes, "the insulin receptors disappeared from their surfaces."

This just means that new therapeutics in both diabetes and Alzheimer's can potentially be developed in lieu of such findings.

Find more details from The Chicago Tribune.