Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have solved a long-standing mystery surrounding the development of Alzheimer's disease. Experts for a long time could not understand why some people with an excess of toxic amyloid proteins in the brain (associated with the disease) never develop dementia. It turned out that the key reason for this is astrocytes, which provoke the disorder. The results of the work are published in the journal Nature Medicine.

During the study, the authors analyzed the blood of more than a thousand cognitively healthy older people with and without amyloid accumulations. The main attention of researchers was occupied by biomarkers of astrocyte reactivity - glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), as well as tau protein.

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They noticed that only those patients who had amyloid plaques in combination with markers of abnormal astrocyte activation developed Alzheimer's disease in the future. The discovery is important for the development of new therapeutic directions for the fight against dementia. In addition, the inclusion of biomarkers such as GFAP in diagnostics will improve the selection of patients in whom the disease progresses at later stages.

In May 2022, researchers at the Ian and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute and Baylor College of Medicine used artificial intelligence to discover gender differences in the genes responsible for Alzheimer's disease.