Dementia looks different in diabetic brain: study

Rueters
By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - People with diabetes who develop dementia have different types of brain changes than others with dementia, a finding that could change the way drug companies think about treatments for Alzheimer's, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

"It suggests that there may be two pathways contributing to the dementia," Suzanne Craft of the Veterans Affairs Puget Sound in Washington, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview. "These two pathways may require different forms of treatment."

Her study, reported in the Archives of Neurology, is among the first to compare different brain injuries in diabetics and others with dementia, and it found some curious differences.

Non-diabetics with dementia had an excess of sticky clumps in the brain known as beta-amyloid plaques, while diabetics, especially those who took insulin, had injuries to small blood vessels in the brain known as arterioles and more swelling in nerve tissue, Craft and colleagues found.

She said most of the people in the study had Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia, and most shared similar symptoms of dementia before their deaths.

"Despite those similarities, they had very........read the whole article

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