Psience Quest

Quote:The study, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience, helps explain the cascade of problems that lead to neurodegeneration after stroke or traumatic brain injury, as well as in diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's—and suggests a potential strategy for therapy.

"What this paper shows is if you lose these vascular cells, you start losing neurons. The link with neurodegeneration was really not that clear before," said senior author Berislav Zlokovic, director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

The discovery comes at a time when scientists are beginning to understand Alzheimer's disease as the result of multiple processes that begin long before memory loss sets in. Many researchers are shifting their focus from the amyloid plaques that accumulate in the brain later in life toward other targets earlier in the timeline.