With information from: Science
Latin News Agency for Medicine and Public Health
Research on a drug showed great effectiveness in reducing the aging of brain cells
A study on fisetin, a chemical component found in fruits and vegetables, can help brain cells recover and prevent diseases such as Alzheimer’s, the drug has been effective in mice, the research group has synthesized variants of this component and CMS121 was found to be very effective in improving memory in animals and preventing degeneration of brain cells.
“This was a more rigorous test of how well this compound works in a therapeutic setting than our previous studies on it,” says Pamela Maher, a senior scientist in the laboratory of Professor David Schubert de Salk.
Study design
The research team applied CMS121 to mice suffering from Alzheimer’s, they injected daily doses starting from the first months of age of the animals, which is equivalent to the middle age of the people, they were administered this dose from the learning degeneration and memory, in order to assimilate the process a patient with this condition must go through.
When the three months of treatment were completed, the investigative body was in charge of carrying out the appropriate behavioral and cognition tests on the animals in the following way: they compared the animals that had undergone CMS121 and those that did not have any brain complications, in addition to those who suffered and were not injected, the results were positive, since compared to memory and behavioral tests, the injected mice responded in parallel to the healthy ones, while those that did not receive the drug had slower skills.
The specialists noted that at the cerebral level, lipids were different between the three animals, since the patients had differences with the healthy and the treated animals, which led to a clear conclusion and identification, that lipid peroxidation was very high in those sick specimens. Compared to the other two, peroxidation is a degradation of lipids that produce radical molecules that can cause cell damage.
Conclusions of the study
It was shown that by means of CMS121 a reduction in the levels of a lipid-producing molecule called fatty acid synthetase (FASN) is achieved and at the same time the elevation of lipid peroxidation was reduced.
In a study carried out by researchers in those patients who had died from Alzheimer’s, it was deciphered that the concentration of FASN was very high, which suggests an advance and a pharmacological study which can regulate these increases in FASN lipids at the brain level.
“There has been a great fight on the field right now to find goals to follow. So impartially identifying a new target like this is really exciting and opens many doors ”adds Maher
It is important to keep in mind that the various studies and investigations are very important to be able to treat those diseases that are considered irreparable, this is a great advance so that those patients who present with Alzheimer’s symptoms can be treated and avoid the disease that hurts a proportion of the long-lived population.
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