Health
Hawai'i may solve Alzheimer's mysteries
By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Staff Writer
Important answers to why Alzheimer's disease attacks some people and not others may lie deep inside the brains of hundreds of Hawai'i men of Japanese ancestry.
And now the National Institute on Aging has granted another $7 million in support over the next five years so on-going Hawai'i research can find those answers.
The latest grant brings to $11 million the money that will be used to minutely analyze the chemical composition of the brains of men whose diet, abilities and lifestyles have been followed for 36 years.
Beginning in 1965, 8,006 American veterans of Japanese ancestry signed on with the Honolulu Heart Program to compare heart disease through lifestyle differences in three areas — Japan, Hawai'i and the West Coast. Study participants here lived longer, healthier lives, and showed more resiliency when it came to heart disease.
That research showed that Hawai'i offered "the golden mean."
Now, as they die, those men have given permission for autopsies of their brains as part of a vastly expanded study to unravel the causes of the diseases of aging, including Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's.
"There's almost no place else in the world that can address these issues because (our information) goes back to what these men were doing more than 25 years ago," said Dr. Lon White, lead researcher in the project.
"There's almost nowhere else where that kind of information has been recorded, where their ability to walk, talk, grip, function and move in a coordinated way has been measured. And we have those measures repeatedly on these men."
The project is finding lifestyle links with brain aging, including untreated high blood pressure, a high daily intake of tofu in the diet, and head trauma. They suspect many other links, including an early exposure to pesticides and other chemicals on Hawai'i plantations, and poor childhood nutrition.
"By looking at who these men are, at the cellular level, we're trying to understand why some escaped some of the disease processes and live long lives and maintain their ability to think and move and be creative and learn and enjoy life, while others gradually lose those through the damaging effects of one or more of these diseases," said White.
"It's so complex that the strategy we're taking is very careful observation and measurement of all the functions and looking inside the nervous system any way we can to look at what's going on at the molecular level."
The research team has done 450 autopsies on the brains of past participants.
The study has already discovered that while 40-50 percent of the men who died had one or more strokes, only 10 percent had any loss of function as a result.
Research is already showing that the more information poured into a brain over the years — in education, training, reading and other skills — the greater the likelihood that a healthy default system is in place.
Additionally, researchers have already discovered that not everyone who develops brain lesions develops Alzheimer's.
"If we are able to understand what it is that protects one person from escaping the damaging consequences of the lesions, that's a secondary way to prevent the disease," said White.
The primary way, of course, is to understand the process that leads to formation of the lesions.
Of great interest to the researchers are those people who, despite their age, never developed any disease at all.
"What is it that they did right, perhaps, that allowed them to escape the lesions," White asks. "Or if they had the lesions but not the disease, what was it that kept them from developing losses of function?"
