To solidify your memory, our brains play them During the break period as a kind of “replay mode”. New mouse study suggests disruption of this process may contribute to associated memory loss alzheimer’s disease disease.

According to a research team at University College London, these findings Diagnose Alzheimer’s disease Treat associated brain damage at an earlier stage.

“Alzheimer’s disease is caused by the buildup of harmful proteins and plaques in the brain, causing symptoms such as memory loss and navigational problems. But exactly how these plaques interfere with normal brain processes is not well understood.” say Neuroscientist Sarah Shipley.

“We wanted to understand how brain cell function changes as the disease progresses and identify what is causing these symptoms.”

Mice in the study were given an Alzheimer’s disease-like condition in which toxins accumulated. amyloid beta protein in their brains. When navigating a maze, experimental animals showed signs of being unable to fix spatial maps in memory.

Whether you’re tackling a maze or your mouse is resting between sessions. Shipley and her colleagues monitored activity in the hippocampus, a brain region that contains location memory neurons. Place cells.

These cells must fire in a specific order for the mouse to remember where it was. as Memories are “stored” for long-term storagethat activation sequence is repeated like a replay.

In mice with amyloid-beta plaques in their brains, the frequency of these regenerations did not change, but the sequence order did. It was like a scene from a mini-movie had been chopped up and saved somewhere else.

This was also seen in maze behavior, where affected mice often forgot which parts of the maze they had already visited, even during the same session. The location cells also became unstable over time, confusing the cell-to-location mapping.

Although this study used a mouse brain model of Alzheimer’s disease, there is good reason to think that the same type of dysfunction occurs in mouse brains. a sick person – Something that may be confirmed through future research.

“We have uncovered the breakdown of how the brain consolidates memories at the level of individual neurons.” say Neuroscientist Caswell Barry.

“What’s surprising is that replay events are still occurring, but they’ve lost their normal structure. It’s not that the brain has stopped trying to consolidate memories; the process itself is wrong.”

Alzheimer’s disease is a complex condition with multiple risk factors. There is various potential causes And many influences on the brain may be working together or separately.

Part of the challenge for researchers lies in the uncertainty of trying to figure out what drives Alzheimer’s disease progression and what happens as a result. Accumulation of amyloid beta.

Related: Bacteria in the back of your eyes may be linked to the progression of Alzheimer’s disease

Studies like this add pieces to the overall jigsaw puzzle, allowing us to better understand the “big picture” of Alzheimer’s disease and how all these causes and effects come together as brain function declines over time.

Each new discovery means something we might be able to do. Detect early signs of disease – Give more time to introduce treatment and support and develop treatments that target specific parts of Alzheimer’s disease.

In this case, it could be a drug that helps boost the regenerative activity of place cells in the hippocampus. However, that won’t be possible until more research specifically identifies the processes that are in place and how to safely adjust them.

“We hope our findings will help develop tests to detect Alzheimer’s disease early, before extensive damage occurs, or lead to new treatments that target this regenerative process.” say Barry.

This study current biology.