She has come a long way. Today, scientists widely accept the theory that first met with laughter. Moreover, Dr. Griffin has moved on from explaining how Alzheimer's disease occurs and predicting who will get the disease to finding how to prevent it. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently awarded her and her colleagues at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) another $7 million to continue her work on Alzheimer's disease and related problems of aging.
Dr. Griffin earned a Ph.D. in physiology at the University of Rochester in 1974 and in the mid-1980s was doing research in developmental neurobiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas. She noticed that the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease and Down's syndrome had a similar excess of cytokines, immune signal proteins that cause inflammation and - sometimes - the death of neighboring neurons. Alzheimer's is a progressive, degenerative brain disease that causes severe memory loss and eventually death. She speculated that Alzheimer's disease occurs because of a cycle of cytokine-induced events in the brain, beginning with the release of amyloid, a protein fragment that is deposited as plaques, triggering release of more of these inflammatory cytokines. Interleukin-1 (IL-1) is chief among these cytokines and has subsequently been shown to cause further release of the plaque components, thereby propagating damage to an ever-expanding area of the brain.
Griffin wondered, If an excess of the cytokines in the brain fosters the development of Alzheimer's, and if the gene that produced that excess could be identified, could scientists "catch" Alzheimer's early enough to prevent it?
Her idea was a departure from the conventional wisdom about Alzheimer's disease. The leading r
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Contact: Leslie W. Taylor
TaylorLeslieW@uams.edu
501-686-8998
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
16-Sep-2002