Engineers have found a way to pinpoint and identify the tiny iron oxide particles associated with Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases in the brain.
The technique is likely to accelerate research on the cause of the diseases and could lead to the first diagnostic procedure for Alzheimer's in patients while they are alive.
"We're the first to be able to tell you both the location of the particles and what kind of particles they are," said Mark Davidson, a University of Florida engineer in UF's materials science and engineering department.
Davidson and collaborators at UF and Keele University in England have published at least four articles on their research in scholarly journals. Their latest article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases affect millions of Americans and cost billions of dollars annually for patient treatment and care. Alzheimer's is the most common of the three, afflicting 4.5 million Americans, with numbers projected to grow as the baby boomers age, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The diseases share some potential symptoms, including physical impairments and dementia.
Although Huntington's is caused by a genetic disorder, little is understood about precisely how Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's wreak havoc in the brain. However, medical researchers have long known that afflicted regions tend to contain unusually high concentrations of iron oxide and other iron-containing particles.
This observation is complicated by the fact that healthy brains also contain iron - indeed, iron is essential for normal brain function.
Traditional methods for studying the properties of "bad iron" tied to neurodegenerative diseases involve staining tissue sections to reveal the location of the iron, or extracting the particles. But these approaches reveal neither the specific iron compounds present nor the relationship of those compounds to specific structures within the tissue.
Electron microscopes don't work either because their tight resolution makes it impossible to search enough area to find the iron.
"It would take you a career to look at one piece of tissue," Davidson said.
To solve the problem, Davidson and Chris Batich, a professor of materials science and engineering, along with Albina Mikhaylova, Jon Dobson and Joanna Collingwood of Keele University, turned to an unlikely facility: the synchrotron at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
The synchrotron is an electron accelerator that produces the most powerful X-rays in the nation. Also known as the Advanced Photon Source, it is usually used for basic science experiments in high-energy physics. But the UF researchers crafted a system of mirrors and lenses that taps one of the cyclotron's 35 "beam lines," or X-ray sources, for the new purpose of analyzing brain tissue.