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WASHINGTON, Mar 20 (Reuters) - A chemical the body produces to defend itself against Alzheimer's may actually attack the brain and help cause the memory loss associated with the disease, US scientists said on Monday.
The human body produces more of the chemical, galanin, when damaged nerves need repairing, and scientists previously linked high concentrations of it in Alzheimer's sufferers with the body's attempt to repair cell destruction in the brain.
But experiments on mice conducted at the University of Washington in Seattle showed excess galanin could in fact damage the animals' memory. The mice had difficulty remembering scents and the locations of objects.
"This could be a sad irony," Robert Steiner, a professor at Washington University and one of the authors of a report on the findings to be published in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Very early on in the disease, galanin might be having beneficial effects. As the brain attempts to rescue itself,...the overexpression of galanin may become its own problem," he added.
"It may be ... making a bad situation even worse. The combination of cell death and ... galanin may be responsible for the memory loss that leaves Alzheimer's patients unable to care for themselves," co-author Jacqueline Crawley said.
If what we know now as Alzheimer's was found to be a combination of factors, sufferers would have to take a cocktail of drugs to target the different causes, the researchers said.
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