August 31, 2015

The race for a cure is heating up, and the $1,000,000,000 prize for curing Alzheimer’s may soon be won.

Research teams at the University of Montreal Hospital’s Medical Research Center just published their findings in a medical journal by the name of Cell Stem Cell. Their research demonstrates that the cause of Alzheimer’s has perhaps been hiding in plain sight for over 100 years.

In 1906, Dr. Aloise Alzheimer noted that he found fatty accumulations while performing autopsies on victims of the dreaded disease that now bears his name. Regrettably, at the time, the fatty tissue was too complex for biochemists of the day, and this finding was cast aside as unusable data.

Fast forward a century. The University of Montreal’s stem cell research team, studying the activity of stem cells in the brains of Alzheimer victims, recently rediscovered these same fatty deposits. The team was able to study and identify the deposits as triglycerides replete with certain fatty acids usually consumed through animal fats and vegetable oils.

Senior author Dr. Karl Fernandes, a research professor at the University of Montreal, sums up the findings, saying “We discovered that these fatty acids are produced by the brain, that they build up slowly with normal aging, but that the process is accelerated significantly in the presence of genes that predispose to Alzheimer’s disease.” Drawing on his work with Alzheimer’s-afflicted mice, Dr. Fernandes believes these fat deposits are not a side effect of the disease but rather a cause. He further believes that an Alzheimer’s cure may be possible through the use of metabolic blocker medications of the type currently being used to treat obesity.

Dr. Catharine Paddock, Ph.D. further develops this in a special report for Medical News Today. You can find it here.