Matthew Keeler
Professor Vejdemo-Johansson
HON 223
November 8, 2021
One article that I found interesting when searching various sources for this week was “New Study Reveals How Alzheimer’s Disease Progresses in the Brain” by Julia Musto posted in the New York Post. The article starts off by explaining the idea of how Alzheimer’s develops in the brain with the protein tau and protein beta-amyloid. Within this article they discuss the findings from a research paper in which scientists from the University of Cambridge studied the growth of these proteins to identify how these “seeds” within the brain replicate and were able to quantify this information with a mathematical model. The news article includes a tweet that demonstrates the brain models that were utilized for the study and contains a quote from the article that encapsulated their conclusions from the study. While stating the findings directly from the research paper, the news article discusses how this is a progression from recent studies of the tau protein’s spread in regions of the brain and the promising importance for the development of new treatments and therapies. Overall, I found that the article is structured in a way to offer background information of the proteins in the brain, discussing the results, then explaining the effect that these findings can have on future research.
When reading through the abstract of the research paper I noticed a lot of similarities to the news article from the New York Post. Once again, they start off by discussing the two proteins that are implicated in the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease in regions of the brain. They discuss their method of bringing together kinetics and measurements to come up with a quantification for the rates of different datasets which revealed the replication in which the number of seeds doubles in 5 years. It was revealed that the rate of progression is being dominated by local replication that occurs within the regions of the brain and when plugged into a spatially dependent reaction equation scientists were able to conclude that their growth rate to be doubling in that five-year period. Additionally, there is finding that there is initiation of aggregation reaction, but this is ultimately taken over by the local replication of the proteins that spreads faster than the time scale of the Alzheimer’s disease itself. By creating these quantitative models can be used in the future to not only determine the rate-limiting process of the body, but also can quantify the tauopathies and other aggregation related diseases with this information there can be therapies developed to help slow the rates of these aggregation diseases.
Overall, when it comes to the comparison between the abstract and the news article from the New York Post they are identical with a lot of the same information coming straight from the abstract. In addition to this, they include a heavy block quote and tweet of a diagram present in the research paper to capture the ideas from the study. As I have realized the news articles present the paper in a way to get clicks on their article but was able to keep the idea and conclusions from the study the same and doesn’t skew the results or data presented in the research paper itself.
Works Cited
Meisl, Georg, et al. “In vivo rate-determining steps of tau seed accumulation in Alzheimer’s disease.” Science Advances 7.44 (2021): eabh1448.
News, F. (2021, November 3). New study reveals how alzheimer’s disease progresses in the brain. New York Post. Retrieved November 8, 2021, from https://nypost.com/2021/11/03/new-study-reveals-how-alzheimers-disease-progresses-in-the-brain/.
