Alzheimer's Spread Through Brain Studied At Stanford

PALO ALTO, CA -- Stanford scientists have developed a computer simulation of how clumps of defective protein in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's spread through the brain in sometimes in stints as long as 30 years.

The inaugural findings released last month dictate how the diseases spread in a stealth mode in a prolonged state, the Stanford News Service outlined. The model's simulations focused on Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -- which is commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease.

"We hope the ability to model neurodegenerative disorders will inspire better diagnostic tests and, ultimately, treatments to slow down their effects," Stanford mechanical engineer Ellen Kuhl said. Kuhl describes the research work in a Physical Review Letters article co-authored with Johannes Weickenmeier of the Stevens Institute of Technology and Alain Goriely of Oxford University.

The group of researchers surmised that by seeing how the diseases produced clumps of defective proteins through time they were able to use slices of the brain from people who have died to come up with the evolution of the spread, the News Service added.

"Imagine a domino effect," said Kuhl, who is part of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Bio-X program. "What our model does is connect the dots between the static data points, mathematically, to show disease progression in unprecedented detail."

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