Biome and Alzheimer’s disease

JeromeBarry1

http://www.nature.com/articles/srep41802

Would any highly technical doctor or scientist take a shot at understanding this?

ddeliciosa

Unfortunately I should be sleeping, so I didn't dive in to deep to this but I'll give you my understanding (coming from a 2nd year pharmD student perspective.)

Just a quick background on Alzheimers - it forms due to a build up of misshaped B-amyloid proteins. So this accumulation of B-amyloid protein is not good - picture these clumps that mess with your brain synapses. Thankfully we have something called APOE (aliproprotein E) which is also a cholesterol carrier and helps clear out these amyloid deposits. However, there's different variations of APOE - and if a person has a nonfunctional type of APOE that doesn't do its job then --> Alzheimers can occur.

Back to the study you linked- They gave the genetic variation (the 16S rRNA whatever) to one group of mice and had another group of mice without the variation. The gut flora between the two groups was remarkably different.

THEN... they gave the genetic variation to a group of mice in a germ-free environment (picture sterile, no microbiotic flora whatsoever so no gut flora) and found that there was a drastic reduction in the alzheimer disease.

To further testing, they exposed the germ-free genetically variant mice to the gut flora of the bad mice (genetic variation & weird gut bacteria from natural upbringing) and found an increase in alzheimer's disease. Conversely, they exposed the germ-free genetically variant mice to the gut flora of the regular mice (no genetic variation, natural upbringing) and found that it was less likely to increase alzheimer's disease, despite the germ-free mice being predisposed.

TLDR; Alzheimers could potentially be linked to your gut flora according to this study. Hope that makes some sense, and I'll try to come back and further digest the rest of the study.