Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham may have found the perfect weapon in the fight against Alzheimer's Disease. Inga Kadish, Ph.D., and her colleagues are experimenting with a ghrelin agonist, which is currently showing great effectiveness at protecting Alzheimer's Disease model mice from memory deterioration.
From Science Daily:
"With chronic diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's, you need to do a long-term study," said Kadish, an assistant professor in the Department of Cell, Developmental and Integrative Biology, UAB School of Medicine. "So we did the long-term experiment with the worst-case scenario, a high-GI diet. Alzheimer's disease has 10 or 20 risk factors, and some of the strongest risk factors are diabetes or metabolic syndrome."
In contrast to short-term administration of the ghrelin agonist drug -- which impairs insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance, which are signs of metabolic syndrome and diabetes -- the researchers found that the long-term ghrelin agonist treatment did not impair insulin signaling and glucose tolerance in Alzheimer's disease mice fed a high GI diet.
...
"The present results suggest," the authors wrote, "that ghrelin might improve cognition in Alzheimer's disease via a central nervous system mechanism involving insulin signaling."
These findings are a critical step forward in the fight against Alzheimer's Disease.
Read the whole article here.