Correlation between experimental data obtained in models to patient-related cognitive deficits. So, I went through the impact that amyloid has on the blood vessels of the brain. And how that may constitute an early, one of the earliest manifestations in a mouse model. And how recent evidence from the ADNI study, which is a huge imaging cohort, showed the same thing in patients. So the changes in the blood vessels seem to be a very early biomarker of disease that could possibly be part of a palette of biomarkers that you’re going to need because of the multifactor nature of Alzheimer’s disease...
Correlation between experimental data obtained in models to patient-related cognitive deficits. So, I went through the impact that amyloid has on the blood vessels of the brain. And how that may constitute an early, one of the earliest manifestations in a mouse model. And how recent evidence from the ADNI study, which is a huge imaging cohort, showed the same thing in patients. So the changes in the blood vessels seem to be a very early biomarker of disease that could possibly be part of a palette of biomarkers that you’re going to need because of the multifactor nature of Alzheimer’s disease.
And then I showed evidence how high blood pressure, which is a major risk factor for dementia by producing altered, either strokes or by damaging the white matter that connects different parts of the brain. And it causes a disconnection syndrome. In other words, the regions of the brain don’t talk to each other as efficiently because there are these roadblocks right there, the white matter doesn’t quite connect. And this leads through the classical executive dysfunction. So, people cannot make good decisions anymore and the psychomotor slowing.
So, they can remember or they can calculate, but it’s going to take them longer to do that. And that’s the classical manifestations of hypertensive use by [inaudible 00:01:55]. We discussed how or what are the mechanisms for that. And how much on this is also true in patients, in terms of how well established the impact of high blood pressure. Even without causing over strokes or in terms of impact in cognition, there are a couple of studies that show that high blood pressure, even it’s the brain is “intact”. Still is going to have negative effects on the hypertension.
Then we presented some of the latest data we have in which we found that there is a connection between dietary salt and tau in the brain. So, the tau is one of the major factors in Alzheimer’s disease that caused the synaptic dysfunction. And we found that, if you eat enough salt, you’re going to get same thing happening to the brain without having Alzheimer’s disease in a relatively young setting. And then there’s data now emerging from the clinical literature, that link groups of people who have an excessive amount on dietary salt intake. For example, [inaudible] and the incidents of minimal cognitive impairment in that particular population. So it looks like, if a population where there is an excessive amount of salt intake, there is also a propensity to developing a cognitive impairments.
And then older studies have shown that if you use the Mediterranean diet and the other dietary interventions. Which have been shown to ameliorate cognition. The reason why they work, seem to be due to the fact that there is a lowering on salt. They, usually this diets are very low in salt. So that kind of putting it together, essentially how the point is that the vessels of the brain can really have a big impact on cognition either in the setting of well-defined vascular risk factors so like a salt in hypertension.
But also in the context of Alzheimer’s disease, where it’s not considered now a major component, at least in terms of conceptually the disease. If you look at the pathology, the data tells you otherwise. If you look at people who have old cameras in a community who develop dementia. Only about fourth of them will have pure Alzheimer’s pathology. The majority of them will have mixed dementia. Whatever these vascular factors are, you got to need to address them if you want to treat dementia in the community. Not being very highly selected groups of patients which do not reflect the impact in the community. So you’re going to have to use a more kind of personalized approach, kind of getting different aspects that may be impactful and causing the cognitive impairments.
