A new MIT study finds that Alzheimer’s disease disrupts at least one form of visual memory by degrading a newly identified circuit that connects the vision processing centers of each brain hemisphere.
The results of the study, published in Neuron by a research team based at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, come from experiments in mice, but provide a physiological and mechanistic basis for prior observations in human patients: the degree of diminished brain rhythm synchrony between counterpart regions in each hemisphere correlates with the clinical severity of dementia.
“We demonstrate that there is a functional circuit that can explain this phenomenon,” said lead author Chinnakkaruppan Adaikkan, a former Picower Institute postdoc who is now an assistant professor in the Center for Brain Research at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. “In a way we uncovered a fundamental biology that was not known before.”
Specifically, Adaikkan’s work identified neurons that connect the primary visual cortex (V1) of each hemisphere and showed that when the cells are disrupted, either by genetic alterations that model Alzheimer’s disease or by direct laboratory perturbations, brain rhythm synchrony becomes…
Medical Xpress. (2022, August 19). When Alzheimer’s degrades cells that cross hemispheres, visual memory suffers
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-alzheimer-degrades-cells-hemispheres-visual.html