An Academia Sinica research team has uncovered, via a mouse model, the secrets of the formation of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD), a brain disorder that causes dementia and for which there is currently no treatment, a researcher said yesterday.
Tsai Kuen-jer (蔡坤哲), an assistant professor at National Cheng Kung University’s Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine who took part in the research, said the findings represented a major breakthrough in the study of the neurodegenerative disease.
Using the model will bring scientists closer to developing and creating efficient drugs or therapies to treat FTLD patients, Tsai said.
FTLD is associated with atrophy in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain that can lead to memory loss, impairment of language ability and sometimes motor neuron disease, Academia Sinica said. It is one of the common causes of various kinds of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.
The research team, led by James Shen (沈哲鯤) of the Institute of Molecular Biology, found an abnormal level of a type of cellular protein known as TAR DNA binding protein 43 (TDP-43) in the brains of FTLD sufferers.
The protein, which is capable of affecting neural cell activity, should exist in the nucleus of a cell, but is found at an increased levels in the cell plasma of people with FTLD, Tsai said.
In the study, the researchers genetically engineered mice with increased levels of TDP-43 in the forebrain. They discovered that the mice exhibited symptoms that mimic FTLD.
“The finding that increased levels of TDP-43 protein in the forebrain are sufficient to cause FTLD and possibly other neurodegenerative diseases yields a new avenue for future studies of FTLD,” the institute said in a statement.
Shen’s research team has already started to test a few drugs that could treat FTLD and a collaboration project with an Australia-based laboratory has also been established to conduct drug screening, it said.
The results of the research paper, titled “Elevated Expression of TDP-43 in the Forebrain of Mice is Sufficient to Cause Neurological and Pathological Phenotypes Mimicking FTLD-U,” were published on July 27 in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Medicine.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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