BOSTON: Researchers have pointed to a new culprit in the whodunnit that seeks to discover who killed the brain of people who died with Alzheimer’s disease: the heart.
The radical new theory into the cause of Alzheimer’s disease suggests that the heart, after powering the brain with 35 million beats per year, eventually destroys it.
The hypothesis has major implications for drug therapies, prevention strategies and research investment and challenges the dominant school of thought on the cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
“The idea is uncongenial and counter-intuitive,” the authors wrote. “Uncongenial because it does not appear to offer a simple path to therapy, counter-intuitive because we are used to thinking of the brain as a dependent ward of the heart, not as a victim of its beat.”
According to their theory, the origin of dementia lies in the cardiovascular system, where years of constant activity stiffens the walls of the great arteries and there is less elasticity to cushion the impact of the pulse on the brain’s smallest blood vessels.
Increasingly, each heartbeat inflicts trauma on the brain, causing silent bleeding and loss of function – first memory, then awareness, personality and consciousness…