Something — or some things — in the blood of young mice has the ability to restore mental capabilities in old mice, a new study by Stanford University School of Medicine investigators has found.
If the same goes for humans, it could spell a new paradigm for recharging our aging brains, and it might mean new therapeutic approaches for treating dementias such as Alzheimer's disease.
In the study, to be published online May 4 in Nature Medicine, the researchers used sophisticated techniques to pin down numerous important molecular, neuroanatomical and neurophysiological changes in the brains of old mice that shared the blood of young mice.
But they also conducted a critical experiment that was far from sophisticated, said Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, the senior author of the study and a professor of neurology and neurological sciences. The scientists simply compared older mice's performance on standard laboratory tests of spatial memory after these mice had received infusions of plasma (the cell-free part of blood) from young versus old mice, or no plasma at all.
"This could have been done 20 years ago," said Wyss-Coray, who is also senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. "You don't need to know anything about how the brain works. You just give an old mouse young blood and see if the animal is smarter than before. It's just that nobody did it."
Wyss-Coray has co-founded a biotechnology company, Alkahest, to explore the therapeutic implications of the new study's findings. He serves as the director of Alkahest's scientific advisory board.
The study's lead author, Saul Villeda, PhD, now has an active lab of his own as a faculty fellow in anatomy at the University of California-San Francisco. Villeda was a graduate student at Stanford and, briefly, a postdoctoral scholar under Wyss-Coray's direction when the bulk of the work was performed.
"We've shown that at least some age-related impairments in brain function are reversible. They're not final," Villeda said.
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Cures and treatments can be found in the strangest places. That being said, my cousin just lost her husband and he had an advanced case of Alzheimer's before his death. It was really hard on everyone and it would be wonderful if future sufferers had a way to halt the symptoms.
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