The thing in Alzheimer's disease to remember, and we remember this all the time at Axovant, is we don't fully understand the way the actual underlying disease works.
Alzheimer's is a disease for which there is no effective treatment whatsoever. To be clear, there is no pharmaceutical agent, no magic pill that a doctor can prescribe that will have any significant effect on the progressive downhill course of this disease.
I started out as a neurologist. I then trained in neuropathology and was focused on neurodegeneration. So, for years, I studied Alzheimer's, aging, Parkinson's, that kind of thing.
What I did when I identified Mike Webster's thing, I showed it to other doctors. We all agreed that this was something new, but we had to give it a name. This was not dementia pugilistica. Maybe we could have called it dementia footballitica!
Omalu first found the tau 'threads' in the brain of former Steeler Mike Webster in 2002 and published his findings in 2005, in the journal 'Neurosurgery.'
Alzheimer's disease starts when a protein that should be folded up properly misfolds into a kind of demented origami.
Inflammation is the cornerstone of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis - all of the neurodegenerative diseases are really predicated on inflammation.
Studies by many labs have already started to identify specific circuits of neurons involved in normal cognitive function like memory and learning, as well as disease processes such as Parkinson's disease, depression, and autism.
If you want to lower your risk of Parkinson's disease, caffeine is protective to some extent; nobody knows why. Head injuries are bad for you. They lead to Parkinson's disease.
The genetics of autism are real, but there are also environmental triggers.
All the NFL players I have examined pathologically, I have not seen one that did not have changes in their brain system with brain damage.
NMDA receptors are concentrated in the areas that control learning and memory, higher functions like multitasking, and some of the more subtle aspects of personality. When the immune system makes antibodies that attack these receptors, people may have seizures and violent fits.
It turns out that this part of the brain is one of the first areas that's attacked by Alzheimer's disease. So we can now use some of the basic understanding of this part of the brain to ask the simple question, 'What is going wrong with these special cells in the hippocampus at the very earliest stages?'
My lab looks at the ability of stress hormones to kill brain cells, and basically we are trying to understand on a molecular level how a neuron dies after a stroke, a seizure, Alzheimer's, brain aging, and what these stress hormones do to make it worse.
Each form of Alzheimer's disease should perturb different brain networks and so influence the concentration of different proteins that can be measured in the blood.
The story of gluten as it relates to the brain throws a wide net, so much more encompassing than the inflammation of a small section of the small intestine that characterizes celiac disease.
There is abundant science out there that connects mercury exposure in vaccines to not only autism, but to ASD, to SIDS, to ADD, ADHD, language tics - which is like Tourette Syndrome - OCD, asthma, food allergies, and diabetes.
My greatest hope is that we learn how trauma induces neurodegeneration in susceptible individuals.
I want Alzheimer's. I want Lou Gehrig's disease. I want Parkinson's. I want Huntington's. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.
