Immune cells outside brain may drive Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine found that immune cells called T cells, long implicated in Alzheimer’s-related brain damage, may actually be activated outside the brain entirely, in lymph nodes and other peripheral tissue.

In mice genetically prone to tau-related disease, eliminating a type of dendritic cell from those peripheral tissues sharply cut the number of T cells reaching the brain and protected against neurodegeneration, even though tau tangles still formed.

The team, led by David Holtzman, says the finding raises the possibility of treating neurodegeneration without needing drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier, since the trigger may lie in the neck's lymph nodes rather than the skull.

The study stops short of claiming the same mechanism operates in people with Alzheimer’s, which is the honest and slightly less exciting part of the press release.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.