Researching links between dementia and blood vessels

Alzheimer’s disease and the connection between blood vessels and brain cells
There’s much we don’t yet know about how our blood vessels link with brain health. PhD student Misha Ramesh hopes to analyse images of the eyes to get a better understanding of the brain blood vessels, and use this information to predict early signs of dementia.
The blood vessels in the brain are regulated by the blood-brain barrier. This barrier acts as a gatekeeper preventing unwanted substances from crossing in and out of the brain, protecting it from harm.
Recent studies suggest that people living with Alzheimer’s disease develop changes to the brain’s blood vessels, which can cause the blood-brain barrier to become defective. This involves changes in how different brain cells work, which can happen before any memory symptoms occur.
One of our DTC PhD students, Noelia Pérez Ramos, aims to understand how brain cells influence blood vessels in the brain after bacterial infection in people with dementia.
Meanwhile, research by Dr Steven Hill at the University of Edinburgh, funded by Alzheimer’s Society, will investigate mechanisms behind how these brain cells change and how these changes cause harm to the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. Dr Hill will also evaluate potential therapies to determine whether we can prevent the onset or reduce the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
Through this research, we’ll be able to gather more information about the early changes which take place in the brains of people living with Alzheimer’s disease.
How is the brain blood supply linked to the immune system and dementia?
When the blood supply to the brain is reduced, the brain becomes inflamed. This increases the number of immune cells, causing brain cells to die. This can also damage the immune cells themselves, so that they can’t function properly and can’t protect the brain from waste. This makes dementia symptoms worse.
There are different types of brain immune cells, defined by where in the brain they are located. Some of those which sense and respond to injury or infection, can communicate with each other, but in Alzheimer’s disease, this communication becomes faulty, causing these cells to eat away connections between nerve cells. The nerve cells die, which contributes to the symptoms of dementia.
Research by Dr Soyon Hong and her PhD student, Lais Sousa da Silva Ferreira, (UKDRI and University College London), funded by Alzheimer’s Society, aims to understand how and when brain immune cells become faulty in Alzheimer’s disease.
By understanding these processes, researchers can learn if we can develop new ways of protecting the brain from damage.
Looking forward to future dementia research
We’re committed to supporting research that would help us understand how blood vessels and immune cells contribute to developing dementia, and what we can do in the future to prevent the damaging processes from taking place.
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