Oxidative stress in the brain might not be major driver of Alzheimer’s disease afterall. We are continuing our analytical work to understand the nature of oxidative changes in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease. We previously found that patients with Alzheimer’s disease have deficiencies in blood and serum non-enzymatic antioxidants (like vitamin C and E and carotenes), but the activity of antioxidant enzymes in the blood was normal. We have just completed a comprehensive meta-analysis to map oxidative changes in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, region by region. This study has been accepted for publication by the journal Free Radical Biology in Medicine and a pre-print copy is available on our website under the “Lab and Projects” tab. We surprisingly found that there was very little evidence of oxidative damage in the brain. Like in the serum, antioxidative enzyme systems were completely intact in all brain regions and markers of lipid, protein and nuclear DNA damage were almost identical to controls. This leads us to believe that global oxidative balance is relatively preserved in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease, although this is somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom on this topic. This may help to explain why most studies of antioxidant treatments in Alzheimer’s disease have not been effective. It is also possible that very specific types of oxidative stress may still be critical to how Alzheimer’s disease develops and progresses that may not be captured in the current analysis, so we will continue to evaluate this literature.
The published version of this manuscript is available here … https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891584917312637.