14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the University of California Irvine have discovered that Alzheimer’s patients lacked the DHA (an omega-3 fatty acid) in the brain and that this is somehow related to the liver's incapacity of producing this complex fat.
[ADMAK=1]Scientists analyzed postmortem liver tissue from Alzheimer’s patients and found that the organ was unable to make docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, which was not the case for non-Alzheimer’s livers.
Most brain DHA is made by the liver and it is necessary for the proper functioning of the adult human brain as well as for the development of the vision and the nervous system during the first six months of life.
DHA can naturally be found in cold-water fatty fish and in seaweed, and like the other omega-3 fatty acids, it is part of a healthy diet that lowers the cholesterol and heart disease risks.
Daniele Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in the Neurosciences and director of the Center for Drug Discovery at UCI, led the research with Giuseppe Astarita, project scientist in pharmacology.
Piomelli said that “we all know Alzheimer’s is a brain disease, but our findings – which were totally unexpected – show that a problem with liver fat metabolism can make people more vulnerable.”
“They also suggest a reason why clinical trials in which Alzheimer’s patients are given omega-3 fatty acids to improve cognitive skills have had mixed results.”
After this new study, researchers concluded that there is a link between the very low level of DHA and a defect in the liver of Alzheimer’s patients.
“Additionally, we found that the greater the amount of Alzheimer’s-related cognitive problems experienced in life by the patients, the lower were their liver DHA levels,” so some kind of connexion exists, said Astarita.
The results of the study suggest that new diagnostic and dietary approaches to Alzheimer’s should be developed, like specific blood lipid profile tests that could be useful in detecting at-risk people and also dietary supplements that could have positive results on early-stage patients.
Astarita stressed that this study does not imply that liver metabolism is the “key to Alzheimer’s,” the causes being much more complex, but scientists are satisfied for having discovered another piece of the puzzle.
At the study took part Carl Cotman, Kwang-Mook Jung, Nicole C. Berchtold, Vinh Q. Nguyen and Daniel L. Gillen of UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, along with Elizabeth Head of the University of Kentucky’s Sanders-Brown Center on Aging.
The study appeared yeasterday in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.