Dr. Gordon Glazner
Dr. Gordon Glazner
Principal Investigator, Cellular Neuropathology & Neurodegeneration
Division of Neurodegenerative Disorders, St-Boniface Hospital Research
Assistant Professor, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Manitoba
Click here to read the June eNews story about Dr. Gordon Glazner research grant from the Alzheimer Society Research Program (ASRP) for 2014.
Dr. Gordon Glazner says that although there is a relationship between Amyloid Beta (Aβ) plaques and Alzheimer’s disease, treatments that reduce or remove Aβ plaques from the brain have very little effect on how Alzheimer's progresses in someone affected by the disease.
" Aβ plays a role in Alzheimer's but we found that treatment targeting Aβ was not the answer," he says.
Instead, Dr. Glazner’s lab has found a correlation between Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. He says that people with diabetes have double the risk for getting Alzheimer’s as a person without.
“It’s important to know that anything that hurts the brain can lead to Alzheimer’s.”
Dr. Glazner says that diabetes causes poor cardiovascular health. “This causes the heart and blood vessels to not work as well,” he explains.
Vascular dementia is described as vessels in the brain not working properly.
“If you take a brain with Alzheimer’s in a non-diabetic, the brain is diabetic,” he says.
When the body stops responding to insulin, the body makes more of it, causing it to crash. That is type two diabetes. The body isn’t making insulin anymore and it isn’t responding to it anymore. When the brain cells stop responding to insulin, Dr. Glazner says that is type three diabetes.
“Everything else in the body can be healthy but the brain is damaged.”
Insulin moves sugar into the body’s organs. It also acts as a general health hormone. But in the brain, it doesn’t move sugar. The brain removes the sugar that it needs from the blood. The brain is dependent on insulin for healthy hormone function. When the brain stops responding to insulin it becomes unhealthy. This makes the brain more susceptible to other risks.
"When you lose the ability to use insulin, which is what diabetes is, it vastly increases the chance for something to go wrong with the brain," he says.
Aβ helps to make cells healthier. Too much of this, though, blocks the receptors, which in turn inhibits movement of insulin, making it easier for the cells to get damaged.
"We're developing ways to increase the insulin system in the brain and help brain health, so that it can fight off getting Alzheimer's disease."
