Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that steals people of their ability to recall and execute basic tasks, such as eating and dressing. There are no meds to subdue or correct this tragic and terminal disease.
Preventing the creation of fibrils and unwinding them once they congregate into plaques are the present concentration of efforts to fight this disease that attacks brain organisms. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, over five million people in the United States, alone, suffer from this disease.

The results from the experiment, which was published recently on the internet in the journal Neurotoxicology, concur with previous human epidemiology experiments that associate regular red wine consumption with a reduction in risk of developing dementia.

Scientists studied resveratrol’s effects on fibrils by adding one type of beta-amyloid (Aβ42) with it and then looking for protein aggregation. They discovered that the larger the dosage of resveratrol, the smaller the quantity of aggregation. Resveratrol dramatically decreased the aggregation by as much as ninety percent.
Resveratrol also triggered the beta-amyloid fibrils to break apart, suggesting it may have the probability to destroy plaque that has already formed.

Though amyloid plaques are a unique aspect of Alzheimer’s disease, it is not totally transparent how these plaques foment the dementia associated with the disease. There is some signs that the fibrils that aggregate into the distinctive plaques are not as toxic to the brain than the intermediate compounds called oligomers. Resveratrol didn’t reduce the creation of oligomers, although the researchers saw some evidence that resveratrol could inhibit their toxic affect on cells.

Researchers at the Litwin-Zucker Research Center for the Study of Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders conducted studies on the peptides that lead to the plaques in the brain that cause Alzheimer’s. They added resveratrol to the cells that produce the peptides, called amyloid-beta, and found that the levels of the peptide were much lower in the cells treated with resveratrol over the untreated cells. While they don’t believe that the amounts of resveratrol found in grapes and wine could produce the results they found in their studies using larger dosages of resveratrol, they do note that grapes and wine contain over 600 compounds, including molecules that, like resveratrol, are powerful antioxidants in their own right. Based on that, they agree with other researchers about the possibility that resveratrol works synergistically with other molecules to produce such remarkable health benefits, including slowing down the process of neurodegeneration in humans. The results of their studies, which they are now working to explain, could lead to the future development of new drugs to fight Alzheimer’s disease.

The peptide mentioned above, amyloid-beta, is a key ingredient in the formation of the plaque in the brain that leads to Alzheimer’s. Resveratrol’s effectiveness against this peptide is not in the halting of the peptide’s production, and is instead found in resveratrol’s ability to encourage its breakdown. Further investigation will lead researchers to determine if resveratrol might also be effective against other amyloid related brain diseases in humans, such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s, and prion diseases, a classification of rare progressive neurodegenerative brain disorders.

More complete human trials are needed, and currently under way, to determine not only if resveratrol may be truly effective against Alzheimer’s disease, but also in what quantity and at what stage. The research is exciting for many reasons, of course, and there is hope that it can lead to lives not only saved, but families restored. Plus, there is the added benefit that we may see higher quality resveratrol supplements being produced as a result.

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