PSYC 301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: Amyloid Precursor Protein, Neurofibrillary Tangle, Amyloid
Document Summary
Alzheimer"s is a big issue and increases each year: because we live to older years, primary cause of dementia, progressive loss of brain tissue, specific pattern of brain loss: starts in temporal lobe and spreads outward. Symptoms: early: selective declines in memory, later: confusion, irritability, anxiety, and deterioration of speech, advanced stages: difficulties with even simple responses (e. g. swallowing, bladder control) First thing you lose is vocabulary and increases to eliciting speech/pronunciation. Later on we see the tangles fill up: suggesting that the tangles are likely the effect, not cause of alzheimer"s. Biomarkers get us close to diagnosing alzheimer"s: low beta-amyloid levels in cerebrospinal fluid, lots of people normally produce this amyloid protein and normally a certain amount of it is passed through our cerebrospinal fluid, but with. In early stages there might be mild benefit of dietary changes (but not much) Theories of pathogenesis: amyloid cascade hypothesis, amyloid"s are the culprit.
