NPR Story 12:00 pm Fri February 3, 2012  Study Tracks
Alzheimer's Progression In Mice  Originally published on Fri
February 3, 2012 12:40 pm    Next up, Alzheimer's research.
Researchers think they have discovered a key clue to how
Alzheimer's spreads in the brain. If you look in the brains of
people diagnosed with Alzheimer's, you can see abnormal clumps
of cell debris called amyloid plaques and tangles of a protein
called tau. And we all have tau proteins in our brains, and we
need them to live. But in people with Alzheimer's, the tau
proteins take on a new shape, and they form into tangles. But in
new work published this week, researchers reported that at least
in mice, the tau tangles seemed to spread through the brain as
Alzheimer's disease progresses.  It's sort of starting out in
one small part of the brain responsible for memory storage, then
spreading sort of like a cancer spreads or a virus. Joining me
now to talk about the finding is Karen Duff. She's one of the
authors of that study in the journal