Author: Laura Sanders / Source: Science News
Do you floss regularly? A study published January 23 in Science Advances — and the news stories that it inspired — might have scared you into better oral hygiene by claiming to find a link between gum bacteria and Alzheimer’s disease.
Those experiments hinted that the gum disease–causing bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis was present in the brains of a small number of people who died with the degenerative brain disease.
Some headlines trumpeted that the cause of Alzheimer’s had finally been found.Enzymes made by P. gingivalis, called gingipains, interact with key Alzheimer’s proteins called amyloid-beta and tau in test tube experiments and in the brains of mice, the researchers found. Gingipains prod A-beta to accumulate and tau to behave abnormally, both signs of Alzheimer’s disease in people, the experiments suggest. And compounds that block gingipains seemed to reduce the amount of A-beta in the infected mice. The findings “offer evidence that P. gingivalis and gingipains in the brain play a central role” in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers write in their study. The research was paid for and conducted in part by employees of Cortexyme, Inc., a San Francisco–based biotech company that’s developing these compounds.
The results fit…
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