“What happens first, and what’s responsible for what? Is the damage to the nerve cells first, and then the plaque, or vice versa?”
The direction of the causal arrow is still uncertain — is the plaque a cause or a symptom? Either way, this result looks like it could be important, as it implies the changes can happen overnight.
An innovative imaging technique has revealed that the plaques that develop throughout the brains of Alzheimer’s patients can form overnight, and they are likely a cause rather than a symptom of the disease.
Plaques, a defining hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, are brain lesions that result from the abnormal accumulation of a protein called amyloid-beta. Since the symptoms of the disease progress over the course of decades, plaques were generally thought to appear and accumulate slowly…
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