Aerobic glyolysis and Alzheimer's disease

摘要

Amyloid plaques, which riddle the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, are thought to precede the onset of symptoms such as dementia. rnAlthough the disease's cause remains a mystery, researchers have known that the pattern of plaque deposition in the brain often matches that of the default mode network, a group of brain regions that are active rneven when people are not engaged in goal-oriented tasks. To determine rnwhether the pattern of amyloid deposition is tied to an underlying pattern of brain metabolism, Andrei Vlassenko et al. (pp. 17763-17767) compared the brains of neurologically healthy adults with those of Alzheimer's rnpatients by using positron emission tomography. The authors found that the pattern of accumulation of plaques in patients closely mirrored the brain regions of healthy adults showing high levels of a metabolic process called aerobic glycolysis, which produces 5% of the brain's energy and accounts for up to 12% of the glucose metabolized in the adult brain.