USF Health part of national resveratrol study for Alzheimer’s disease

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Can a component found in red wine help change the course of Alzheimer’s disease?


The USF Health Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute has been selected as one of the sites for a federally-sponsored clinical study testing whether resveratrol can alter or delay memory deterioration and daily functioning in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.


Some of the highest levels of resveratrol are found in red wine and the skin of red grapes, but the plant-derived compound is also present in chocolate, berries, tomatoes and peanuts.


The double-blind, placebo-controlled Resveratrol for Alzheimer’s Disease Study, supported by the National Institute on Aging, will be conducted at 26 sites across the United States affiliated with the Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study. Each research site, including USF’s, will enroll up to 10 participants


Amanda Smith, MD, medical director at the Byrd Alzheimer’s institute, leads the USF site study on the safety, tolerability and effectiveness of the natural compound (pure resveratrol in capsule form). The one-year trial has begun recruiting participants.


“This is an exciting study for a couple of reasons,” Dr. Smith said. “First, it is a naturally-occurring substance, and that is sometimes more appealing to participants. Secondly, it approaches the disease from a different angle than many other treatments being tested, so it could be another weapon in the multi-pronged approach to treating Alzheimer’s.”


Resveratrol activates a class of enzymes known as sirtuins, which are involved in modulating metabolism and may affect regulatory pathways of diseases of aging. Pre-clinical research and pilot clinical studies suggest the compound may prevent diabetes, ward off cardiovascular disease, act as a natural cancer fighter, and prevent memory loss, but there has been no large definitive study of its effects in humans.


“It’s a hot topic of research interest these days,” said Min You, PhD, associate professor in the USF Health Department of Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, whose published studies of resveratrol in mice found that the substance may prevent alcoholic fatty liver disease.


“SIRT1, one of the targets of resveratrol, is a metabolic sensor in every tissue of the body, including the heart, liver and brain,” Dr. You said. “Resveratrol keeps metabolic processes in balance and plays a role in longevity.”
Dr. You, who has studied resveratrol and its regulatory pathways for nearly eight years, believes the compound may have greater potential to prevent than treat age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, obesity and heart disease. “It’s quickly removed from the bloodstream when consumed, so you’d likely have to take a very high amount of resveratrol to reverse pathology,” she said. “However chronic consumption of low-dose resveratrol could be good as a preventive approach.”




For more information on the Resveratrol for Alzheimer’s Disease Study, call the Byrd Institute at (813) 974-4355.

Could a Diabetes Drug and a Supplement Work Together to Treat Alzheimer's Disease

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Metformin is a medication used to treat diabetes. Resveratrol is a supplement that has the benefits of drinking concentrated red wine. Doctors at Dundee University say that taking both of these things together may stop
Alzheimer's disease in its tracks.

The doctors report that metformin interferes with the development of tau which are neurofibratory tangles. Neurofibratory tangles severly limit communication between brain cells in Alzheimer's disease. They also say that Resveratrol limits the formation of these neurofibratory tangles. This research could help millions of people from getting Alzheimer's disease.

Resveratrol is a type of natural phenol, and is produced naturally by several plants when they are under the attack of harmful bacteria or fungi. Resveratrol is found in the skin of red grapes. Red wine seems to contains a high level of it.

Resveratrol was added to the cells that produce abnormal proteins called amyloid-beta. The research scientists who did this found that the levels of this abnormal protein were much lower in the cells treated with resveratrol over the untreated cells. While the scientists do not think that the amounts of resveratrol found in grapes and wine could produce the results they found in their studies using larger amounts of resveratrol. These research scientists think that grapes and wine contain molecules that, like resveratrol, are strong antioxidants. The scientists feel that resveratrol can work with other drugs like metformin to fight Alzheimer's disease.

Some experts say that it is read all of..... Could a Diabetes Drug and a Supplement Work Together to Treat Alzheimer's Disease

Research From Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Offers Clues to Alzheimer’s Disease

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An organic compound found in red wine — resveratrol — has the ability to neutralize the toxic effects of proteins linked to Alzheimer’s disease, according to research led by Rensselaer Professor Peter M. Tessier. The findings, published in the May 28 edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, are a step toward understanding the large-scale death of brain cells seen in certain neurodegenerative diseases.

“We’ve shown how resveratrol has very interesting selectivity to target and neutralize a select set of toxic peptide isoforms,” Tessier said. “Because resveratrol picks out the clumps of peptides that are bad and leaves alone the ones that are benign, it helps us to think about the structural differences between the peptide isoforms.”

Isoforms are different packing arrangements of a particular peptide. Deformations of a particular peptide — the Aβ1-42 peptide — have been linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Improperly folded peptides have been shown to collect in accumulations called “plaques” within the brain. Those plaques are often found near areas of cell death in diseased brains.

It is not clear that resveratrol is able to cross the blood-brain barrier, Tessier said. However, the molecule has garnered interest in recent years for its potential impact on cancer and aging.

In their research, Tessier and his co-authors generated Aβ peptides packed together in five unique isoforms, or “arrangements” (monomer, soluble oligomer, non-toxic oligomer, fibrillar intermediates and amyloid fibrils). In their experiments, three of these arrangements were toxic to human cells, two were not.

Next, the researchers introduced resveratrol.

The resveratrol reacted with the toxic arrangements of the Aβ1-42 peptide, neutralizing their toxicity.

It did not affect the non-toxic arrangements.

“The surprise is that this molecule can target some of these packing arrangements that are toxic and rearrange them into packing arrangements that are not toxic. For those forms that are non-toxic, it doesn’t change them,” Tessier said.

Intriguingly, Tessier said, one of the toxic arrangements (the soluble oligomer) and one of the non-toxic arrangements (the non-toxic oligomer) were indistinguishable by various methods. And yet the resveratrol only affected the toxic arrangement.

The point, Tessier concludes, is that the seemingly identical non-toxic and toxic arrangements must have some distinguishing feature yet to be discovered, raising questions for future study.

“We have two things that look very similar, but one is toxic and the other isn’t,” Tessier said. “What is it that makes the bad one bad and the good one good?”

The research produced several other findings, Tessier said, including reliable methods of generating the arrangements Tessier’s team produced, and formation of one arrangement which had previously been unknown.

Last week, Tessier was named as a 2010 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences by the Pew Charitable Trusts.The distinction includes an award of $240,000 over four years and inclusion into a select community of scientists that includes three Nobel Prize winners, three MacArthur Fellows, and two recipients of the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Tessier was also recently awarded a five-year, $411,872 Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for research in the related field of protein thermodynamics and aggregation.

The CAREER Award is given to faculty members at the beginning of their academic careers and is one of NSF’s most competitive awards, placing emphasis on high-quality research and novel education initiatives.

Tessier joined the Rensselaer faculty in 2007 following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He received his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Maine, and went on to earn his doctoral degree in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware.