With all the advances in medicine, the human brain remains a largely undiscovered frontier. Luckily, neuroscience is constantly evolving, and every year, we’re getting closer to uncovering better ways of treating patients with brain disorders. In a recent study, researchers established and quantified the prevalence of a brand new type of dementia called limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy (or LATE).
According to the paper, as many as 40% of all older adults and nearly half of all Alzheimer’s patients display brain changes consistent with LATE. This is an extremely important discovery, as patients exhibiting symptoms of LATE may require a different type of treatment than Alzheimer’s patients. This is neither good nor bad news, as we still don’t know if LATE is easier to harder to treat than Alzheimer’s disease.
The research will soon appear in the Acta Neuropathologica journal, and it offers a comprehensive idea of how common LATE is.
Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy symptoms are comparable to those of Alzheimer’s disease. Symptoms appear in older age and involve memory loss and issues with reasoning.
The research in question examined more than 6,000 clinical data and brains from 5 countries and 3 continents. Although the condition mimics Alzheimer’s, it looks very different in the brain. This allowed the researcher to determine that nearly 40% of the sample and nearly 50% of those that belonged to Alzheimer’s patients had LATE.
“Given older ages are when dementia is most common, the LATE findings are particularly important. Although there are many differences between the studies that are combined here — from design to methodologies — they all reveal the importance of LATE and suggest our findings will be relevant beyond any individual country or region of the world,” stated Dr. Carol Brayne, a British academic and Professor of Public Health Medicine at the University of Cambridge to Science Daily.
The importance of this study is that it proves that LATE is a very common condition that goes hand in hand with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. While this is a major leap in researching LATE, there are still many things we don’t know about this condition. For one, it remains unknown where people of different ethnicities have a different risk of developing the disease. The next step for the research team is designing a trial with potential preventative treatments for LATE and Alzheimer’s.
H/T: Science Daily
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