Alzheimer's: The Result of an Unnoticed, Chronic Low-Grade Infection?
Beta amyloid, aka abeta, builds up dramatically in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's. So, beta amyloid causes Alzheimer's, right? Or has something to do with causing it, right? At least it needs to be eliminated because people who don't have it don't have Alzheimer's so it must be bad somehow, right?
Maybe not. In a new report that demonstrates perfectly two (re-)emerging views about chronic diseases researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have shown that beta amyloid is a potent antibiotic effective against fungi like Candida albicans and bacteria like Staphylococcus. They go on to hypothesize that far from being bad, beta amyloid may in fact be very good. It may well save you from brain infections that would otherwise kill you at a much younger age. An excellent write up can be found at Bloomberg and the article itself, "The Alzheimer's Disease-Associated Amyloid beta-Protein is an Antimicrobial Peptide", is at Plos One.
Oh, and those two (re-)emerging views about chronic diseases? The first is that too often scientists and physicians fall into the trap of assuming that the arrow of causation runs from biomarker to disease when in fact the body, with millions of years of fine tuning under the hood, has almost certainly some mechanism to deal with the build up of the by-products of its defenses such that fooling with that immune system, given our level of ignorance about how it works, is perilous at best. The second is that microbes, thought to have been essentially conquered 40 years ago, are in fact at the root of many if not most maladies commonly thought to be caused by man. Microbes it turns out have not been asleep over the eons nor even over the last 40 years. Almost weekly as new ways to culture and identify them are developed, new and heretofore unsuspected infections are identified. We're only beginning to understand the nature of the microbes that help us and prey upon us and so for now perhaps it's enough to consider the fact that in our own bodies they outnumber our human cells nine to one.
One last thing, isn't it interesting that many of the drugs currently being tested to determine their anti-aging potential are also potent anti-fungals? Correlation isn't, of course, causation, but it might be worth pondering.
