December 7, 2017
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have found that Alzheimer’s disease causes microglia — the immune cells that normally protect brain cells from damage — to change their behavior and instead promote a pro-inflammatory immune response.
Their study, “Temporal Tracking of Microglia Activation in Neurodegeneration at Single-Cell Resolution,” appeared in the journal Cell Reports.
“Right now, microglia are really in the spotlight for a number of neuro-system diseases, including Alzheimer’s, and also schizophrenia,” Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the study’s senior author, said in a news release. “However, there are still a lot of very basic things that we don’t know about microglia, such as whether cells in the healthy and diseased brain are all the same, or whether there are different groups, and how they become more inflammatory in the diseased state.” Read in Alzheimer's News Today >>