A team of researchers at Stanford Medicine has uncovered an unexpected link between a common blood condition and a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
The condition, known as clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential, or CHIP, is associated with an increased risk of several other diseases including coronary heart disease, chronic liver disease, and blood cancers.
CHIP and Its Effects
In people with CHIP, certain blood stem cells develop mutations that boost their survival and multiplication, allowing them to dominate the body’s blood and immune cells.
Despite the increased risk of certain diseases, the team found that people with CHIP are 30% to 50% less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Bridging the Gap: CHIP and Alzheimer’s
Though the link between CHIP and a decreased risk of Alzheimer’s is not entirely understood, the researchers suggest that mutated blood cells could migrate into the brain, contradicting the widely accepted belief that blood cells cannot cross into the brain due to the blood-brain barrier.
Microglia, the brain’s own immune cells, are known to combat inflammation and buildup of toxins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
When examining brain samples from individuals with CHIP, researchers found that a significant proportion of microglia carried the same mutations seen in the CHIP-associated blood cells.
The Potential Impact of Mutated Microglia
The hypothesis is that these mutated microglia, derived from the mutated blood stem cells, could be more active in fighting conditions that lead to brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s.
Further supporting this hypothesis, the researchers found that the brain samples from individuals with CHIP showed lower levels of neurofibrillary tangles and amyloid plaques, both key markers associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Future Research Directions
The team at Stanford Medicine plans to conduct further studies to understand more about how these mutated microglia might be protecting against Alzheimer’s disease.
They will investigate how to convert CHIP blood stem cells into microglia in order to understand how these cells behave differently from normal microglia.
Understanding these mechanisms could open up new possibilities for the development of therapeutics that might one day protect against Alzheimer’s disease, offering hope in the quest for more effective Alzheimer’s treatments.
However, it is still early days, and there is much research to be done.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, please read studies about Vitamin D deficiency linked to Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, and Oral cannabis extract may help reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about Vitamin B9 deficiency linked to higher dementia risk, and results showing flavonoid-rich foods could improve survival in Parkinson’s disease.
The study was published in Nature Medicine.
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