Public release date: 23-Feb-2006
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/uof-abt022306.php

Contact: Mark Davidson
mark@microfab.ufl.edu
352-846-2083
University of Florida

A better tool to study role of iron in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's

Engineers have found a way to pinpoint and identify the tiny iron oxide
particles associated with Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative
diseases
in the brain.

The technique is likely to accelerate research on the cause of the
diseases and could lead to the first diagnostic procedure for
Alzheimer's
in patients while they are alive.

"We're the first to be able to tell you both the location of the
particles
and what kind of particles they are," said Mark Davidson, a University
of
Florida engineer in UF's materials science and engineering department.

Davidson and collaborators at UF and Keele University in England have
published at least four articles on their research in scholarly
journals.
Their latest article has been accepted for publication in the Journal
of
Alzheimer's Disease.

Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases affect millions of
Americans and cost billions of dollars annually for patient treatment
and
care. Alzheimer's is the most common of the three, afflicting 4.5
million
Americans, with numbers projected to grow as the baby boomers age,
according to the Alzheimer's Association. The diseases share some
potential symptoms, including physical impairments and dementia.

Although Huntington's is caused by a genetic disorder, little is
understood about precisely how Huntington's, Alzheimer's and
Parkinson's
wreak havoc in the brain. However, medical researchers have long known
that afflicted regions tend to contain unusually high concentrations of
iron oxide and other iron-containing particles.

This observation is complicated by the fact that healthy brains also
contain iron - indeed, iron is essential for normal brain function.

Traditional methods for studying the properties of "bad iron" tied to
neurodegenerative diseases involve staining tissue sections to reveal
the
location of the iron, or extracting the particles. But these approaches
reveal neither the specific iron compounds present nor the relationship
of
those compounds to specific structures within the tissue.

Electron microscopes don't work either because their tight resolution
makes it impossible to search enough area to find the iron.

"It would take you a career to look at one piece of tissue," Davidson
said.

To solve the problem, Davidson and Chris Batich, a professor of
materials
science and engineering, along with Albina Mikhaylova, Jon Dobson and
Joanna Collingwood of Keele University, turned to an unlikely facility:
the synchrotron at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National
Laboratory near Chicago.

The synchrotron is an electron accelerator that produces the most
powerful
X-rays in the nation. Also known as the Advanced Photon Source, it is
usually used for basic science experiments in high-energy physics. But
the
UF researchers crafted a system of mirrors and lenses that taps one of
the
cyclotron's 35 "beam lines," or X-ray sources, for the new purpose of
analyzing brain tissue.

The results are impressive. Whereas an electron microscope can examine
tissue one micron, or one thousandth of a centimeter, the new device
can
look at tissue two or three hundred microns in size. If it locates a
particle, it then uses traditional spectroscopic methods to zoom in and
determine what sort of iron the particle happens to be.

"It's the equivalent of being up in an airplane, looking at the city of
Tampa, and telling you whether there is a penny there or not," Davidson
said. "And then once we zoom in, we can tell you what kind of penny it
is."

So little is understood about the role of iron in neurodegenerative
diseases today that it's not even clear whether the iron is a symptom
or a
cause, Batich said. The UF technique may help by giving researchers a
clearer view of the problem.

"The basic idea is, if you understand the mechanism, you can understand
ways to try to treat the disease," he said.

But the UF technique could also have clinical value. Davidson said that
the group is planning to do experiments that could one day lead to
using
magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to highlight damaging iron in
patients' brains.

"If we can adjust the MRI to look for specific iron compounds related
to
Alzheimer's we may be able to provide a technique for early diagnosis
before clinical symptoms appear. The major advantage of this is that
most
treatments currently in development rely on early detection to slow or
halt progression of the disease, as they cannot reverse it," he said.

Who loves ya.
Tom

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