Science / Medicine : Alzheimer’s Linked to Head Injury

British scientists said last week that they had discovered a causal link between severe head injuries and Alzheimer’s disease, a terminal brain disorder that afflicts an estimated 4 million elderly people in the United States.

“It has been argued for a long time that Alzheimer’s has several different causes. Our data is the first direct evidence that head injury may be one significant causative factor,” said Dr. Gareth Roberts of London’s St. Mary’s Hospital Medical School.

Roberts and his colleagues reported in The Lancet that they found clumps of an abnormal protein called beta-amyloid in the brains of head injury victims. The clumps were identical to deposits that build up in Alzheimer’s sufferers, but which are not present in healthy people. They found that the protein is produced within hours or days of a serious head injury.

“Our next stage is to work out how much of a head trauma will trigger amyloid production and to see if we can manipulate the response by using different drugs,” he said.