She is a VA research health scientist at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, faculty member of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, and instructor of pharmacology at UT Health San Antonio.
“When cells enter this stage, they change their genetic programming and become pro-inflammatory and toxic,” said study senior author Miranda E. Scientists also found them in postmortem tissue from another brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy.Ĭellular senescence allows the stressed cell to survive, but the cell may become like a zombie, functioning abnormally and secreting substances that kill cells around it. The researchers identified senescent cells in postmortem brain tissue from Alzheimer’s patients. Treatment reduced the number of the harmful tangles by about 35 percent when compared to mice given a sugar pill.Ī type of cellular stress known to be involved in cancer and aging has now been implicated, for the first time, in Alzheimer’s disease.Ī team of researchers found that the stress, called cellular senescence, is associated with harmful tau protein tangles that are a hallmark of 20 human brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury.
Mice that model this effect were treated with drugs to clear the troubled cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, brain cells that acquire protein tangles become “zombie-like,” or senescent (stained yellow).
