Vaccination to Keep Your Memory?

Who wouldn’t want to keep their memory when aging?!

Well, researchers have just announced some promising results in mice enabling them to keep their memories and avoid some of nasty neuro-degenerative aspects of Alzheimer’s.

What did they discover?

If you read the research and the press release, it gets technical and complicated very quickly, so let me translate this for you:

During aging we have more oxidative stress and accumulated stress over our lifetimes, this leads to various proteins, notably one called beta amyloid, building up in the brain. These clumps are resistant to removal and so end up continuing to build up over time contributing to multiple factors and particular impairing memory but in general decreased cognitive function.

The researchers around Adam Smith at the University of Kansas processed a protein from corn in the lab to produce an antigen which helps the immune system to clear out these clumped proteins in the brain. This is effectively a vaccination — mice injected with this showed greater short-term memory on lab tests (such as the clichéd maze tasks) but also on long-term memory. The markers for inflammation in the brain were also lower in blood samples.

The obvious question is would this translate to human beings? Because of the nature of the mechanism which is similar in human beings the researchers think it would but, obviously, this will need more research. But nevertheless very, very promising.

I’m waiting…