When a person ages and begins to lose their memory, to even forget the names of their loved ones, it is already too late. Alzheimer's has been silently destroying his brain for years. If its skull could be opened, dead neurons and accumulations of two characteristic proteins would be observed: amyloid and tau. The disease threatens to devastate civilization in the coming decades—every year there are 10 million new cases of dementia—but the scientific community still has no idea what causes it. An international team, in which the Spanish neuroscientist participates Amaia Arranz, has introduced 100,000 human neurons into the brains of mice to try to investigate in vivo what happens during Alzheimer's. The authors have observed how cells perish and have managed to avoid this neuronal death with a simple oral treatment. Its preview is published this Thursday in the magazine Science, one of the temples of world science.
