How this may
work is not spelled out but simple detection is a powerful beginning. Actual physical removal or even disturbance
may well lead to resolution and perhaps an actual cure. Yet it now mostly looks like a promising
start point.
For now we
will take it. There are scant
alternatives.
I do not think
that these proteins are the actual cause anyway but more likely a derivative of
a systemic failure that also needs to be addressed. We are still seeing progress.
Lasers
might be the cure for brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
Nov 04, 2013 07:00 GMT
Researchers at Chalmers University of
Technology in Sweden, together with researchers at the Polish Wroclaw University
of Technology, have made a discovery that may lead to the curing of diseases
such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the so called
mad cow disease) through photo therapy.
The researchers discovery, which was published
yesterday in the journal Nature
Photonics, is that it is possible to distinguish aggregations of the
proteins, believed to cause the diseases, from the the well-functioning
proteins in the body by using multi-photon laser technique.
“Nobody has talked about using only light to
treat these diseases until now. This is a totally new approach and we believe
that this might become a breakthrough in the research of diseases such as
Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. We have found a
totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser light”,
says Piotr Hanczyc at Chalmers University of Technology.
If the protein aggregates are removed, the
disease is in principle cured. The problem until now has been to detect and
remove the aggregates.
The researchers now harbor high hopes that
photo acoustic therapy, which is already used for tomography, may be used to
remove the malfunctioning proteins. Today amyloid protein aggregates are
treated with chemicals, both for detection as well as removal. These chemicals
are highly toxic and harmful for those treated.
With multi photon laser the chemical treatment
would be unnecessary. Nor would surgery be necessary for removing of
aggregates. Due to this discovery it might, thus, be possible to remove the
harmful protein without touching the surrounding tissue.
These diseases arise when amyloid beta protein
are aggregated in large doses so they start to inhibit proper cellular
processes.
Different proteins create different kinds of
amyloids, but they generally have the same structure. This makes them different
from the well-functioning proteins in the body, which can now be shown by multi
photon laser technique.
Scientific article:
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