Not just for cancer
Radiotherapy helps with Alzheimer's disease
Kirill Stasevich, Science and Life (nkj.ru )
Radiotherapy, or radiation therapy, is usually discussed in connection with oncological diseases. Ionizing radiation damages DNA, and if it is directed at a tumor, even cancer cells will not withstand the genetic defects that they will have.
However, radiation therapy can be effective for other diseases. Employees of the Baycrest Medical Center and Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto write in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Cuttler et al., Low Doses of Ionizing Radiation as a Treatment for Alzheimer's Disease: A Pilot Study) that ionizing radiation benefits patients with Alzheimer's syndrome.
At first, it was a single case with a patient who had her brain irradiated in 2015, after which her cognitive functions improved, including speech, she began to control her own movements better, and her appetite even increased.
The researchers decided to test this effect on four patients with a severe form of the disease. Three times, with an interval of two weeks, they received small doses of radiation – a conventional CT scanner was used as a radiation source. The condition of the patients was assessed both with the help of special tests and by the feedback of relatives and friends.
In three patients, the condition improved literally the next day after the first radiation session. They reacted more actively to what was happening around them, became more mobile, recognized their relatives more easily and made contact easier. One of the patients even greeted her son, although she had not done so for several years. Another patient kissed his daughter and started clapping rhythmically when they decided to listen to music.
Ionizing radiation has different effects, and one of them is oxidative stress: aggressive oxidizing molecules appear in the cell, which damage proteins, nucleic acids and lipids. In turn, cells have protection systems that help to quickly get rid of dangerous compounds; at the same time, DNA repair systems that correct mutations are activated. With age, cellular security systems begin to work worse, but a portion of radiation, obviously, gives them a good shake. It may well be that the activation of protective biochemistry helps neurons to partially recover, so that the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease recede.
What is the true mechanism here remains to be found out, and in the same way it remains to be found out how long the therapeutic effect of radiation lasts. If the results are confirmed in a larger number of patients, and if the effect is long-term, radiotherapy can become one of the clinical tools that can slow down Alzheimer's disease.
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