30 months ago, a fascinating paper appeared in which flickering light improved a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. The authors (MIT mostly) have continued to extend their work. Here is a copy of the post back then. Their new work is summarized after the ****
Big pharma has spent zillions trying to rid the brain of senile plaques, to no avail. A recent paper shows that light flickering at 40 cycles/second (40 Hertz) can do it — this is not a misprint [ Nature vol. 540 pp. 207 – 208, 230 – 235 ’16 ]. As most know the main component of the senile plaque of Alzheimer’s disease is a fragment (called the aBeta peptide) of the amyloid precursor protein (APP).
The most interesting part of the paper showed that just an hour or so of light flickering at 40 Hertz temporarily reduced the amount of Abeta peptide in visual cortex of aged mice. Nothing invasive about that.
Should we try this in people? How harmful could it be? Unfortunately the visual cortex is relatively unaffected in Alzheimer’s disease — the disease starts deep inside the head in the medial temporal lobe, particularly the hippocampus — the link shows just how deep it is -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocampus#/media/File:MRI_Location_Hippocampus_up..png
You might be able to do this through the squamous portion of the temporal bone which is just in front of and above the ear. It’s very thin, and ultrasound probes placed here can ‘see’ blood flowing in arteries in this region. Another way to do it might be a light source placed in the mouth.
The technical aspects of the paper are fascinating and will be described later.
First, what could go wrong?
The work shows that the flickering light activates the scavenger cells of the brain (microglia) and then eat the extracellular plaques. However that may not be a good thing as microglia could attack normal cells. In particular they are important in the remodeling of the dendritic tree (notably dendritic spines) that occurs during experience and learning.
Second, why wouldn’t it work? So much has been spent on trying to remove abeta, that serious doubt exists as to whether excessive extracellular Abeta causes Alzheimer’s and even if it does, would removing it be helpful.
Now for some fascinating detail on the paper (for the cognoscenti)
They used a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease (the 5XFAD mouse). This poor creature has 3 different mutations associated with Alzheimer’s disease in the amyloid precursor protein (APP) — these are the Swedish (K670B), Florida (I716V) and London (V717I). If that wasn’t enough there are two Alzheimer associated mutations in one of the enzymes that processes the APP into Abeta (M146L, L286V) — using the single letter amino acid code –http://www.biochem.ucl.ac.uk/bsm/dbbrowser/c32/aacode.html.hy1. Then the whole mess is put under control of a promoter particularly active in mice (the Thy1 promoter). This results in high expression of the two mutant proteins.
So the poor mice get lots of senile plaques (particularly in the hippocampus) at an early age.
The first experiment was even more complicated, as a way was found to put channelrhodopsin into a set of hippocampal interneurons (this is optogenetics and hardly simple). Exposing the channel to light causes it to open the membrane to depolarize and the neuron to fire. Then fiberoptics were used to stimulate these neurons at 40 Hertz and the effects on the plaques were noted. Clearly a lot of work and the authors (and grad students) deserve our thanks.
Light at 8 Hertz did nothing to the plaques. I couldn’t find what other stimulation frequencies were used (assuming they were tried).
It would be wonderful if something so simple could help these people.
For other ideas about Alzheimer’s using physics rather than chemistry please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/11/30/could-alzheimers-disease-be-a-problem-in-physics-rather-than-chemistry/
****
The new work appears in two papers.
First [ Cell vol. 1777 pp. 256 – 271 ’19 ] 7 days of auditory tone stimuli at 40 cycles/second (40 Hertz) for just one hour a day reduced amyloid in the auditory cortex of the same pathetic mice described above (the 5XFAD mice). They call this GENUS (Gamma ENtrainment Using sensory Stimuli). Neurologists love to name frequencies in the EEG, and the 40 Hertz is in the gamma range.
The second paper [ Neuron vol. 102 pp. 929 – 943 ’19 ] is even better. Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by two types of pathology — neurofibrillary tangles inside the remaining neurons and the senile plaque outside them. The tangles are made of the tau protein, the plaques mostly of fragments of the amyloid precursor protein (APP). The 5XFAD mouse had 3 separate mutations in the APP and two more in the enzyme that chops it up.
The present work looked at the other half of Alzheimer’s the neurofibrillary tangle. They had mice with the P301S mutation in the tau protein found in a hereditary form of dementia (not Alzheimer’s) and also with excessive levels of CK-p25 which also results in tangles.
Again chronic visual GENUS worked in this (completely different) model of neurodegeneration.
This is very exciting stuff, but I’d love to see a different group of researchers reproduce it. Also billions have been spent and lost on promising treatments of Alzheimer’s (all based on animal work).
Probably someone is trying it out on themselves or their spouse. A EE friend notes that engineers have been trying homebrew transcranial magnetic and current stimulation using themselves or someone close as guineapigs for years.
Chemiotics II 