ABOVE: The newly described plaque (green, red, and yellow) with its direct connection with blood vessels (blue)
B.D.C. BOON ET AL., ACTA NEUROPATHOLOGICA, DOI:10.1007/S00401-020-02198-8, 2020
Scientists have discovered a type of amyloid-β plaque in the brains of people with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease that has not been observed before. These “coarse-grained” plaques, described in a study published last week in Acta Neuropathologica, have a different structure, composition, and distribution from the typical amyloid plaques that have been well-studied in the disease.
“For a different study, we were looking into the neuroinflammatory response in early-onset AD cases,” says Baayla Boon, a PhD candidate in pathology at Amsterdam UMC and the lead author of the study. Examining post-mortem brain slices from this small group of similar cases, she noticed a lot of plaques that appeared darker than expected under the microscope. “We realized that these plaques look different from what we actually knew,” she ...
