Transcript
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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Prevent]
[Professor Elizabeth Coulson, The University of Queensland]
Prof. Elizabeth: I am Professor Lizzie Coulson, and I'm head of School of Biomedical Sciences here at University of Queensland. I also head the Neurotrophins in Alzheimer's Disease Lab at the School of Biomedical Sciences.
As we well know, dementia is a terrible burden on society and there are no treatments that really stop the disease from occurring and progressing. So, one way to tackle this problem is to see what the risk factors are for developing dementia, and one of those risks factors we know is obstructive sleep apnoea, of which occurs very predominantly in the elderly population. So, obstructive sleep apnoea is where you get a blocked airway during sleep, and this stops the flow of oxygen, and so your brain gets less oxygen, and this is intermittent.
Funded by National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, we had a project to understand what obstructive sleep apnoea, how it might link to the risk of dementia. So in my lab, a postdoctoral fellow Lei Qian developed a mouse model of obstructive sleep apnoea, and then we could study the links to Alzheimer's disease, and what he found was that a particular set of neurons in the brain that we know degenerate in Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia degenerated in the mice due to the lack of oxygen in the brain.
[Dr Lei Qian, The University of Queensland]
Dr Lei Qian: Hi, I’m Lei Qian, a post-doctoral research fellow working in the School of Biomedical Science at the University of Queensland. We developed a mouse model which mimics the symptoms of obstructive sleep apnoea in human. Our aim of this project is to test the potential compound, whether it contains the hypoxia, and eventually to stop the neural loss, and stop the Alzheimer’s disease.
Elizabeth: So, leading on from the National Health and Medical Research funded study, Dementia Australia Research Foundation has provided money for Dr Qian to extend his work using the mouse model of obstructive sleep apnoea to try and stop the neurons dying in our mouse model. This is incredibly important because the molecules that we're going to use to try and stop the neurons dying, one of those molecules is actually in first phase one clinical trials for safety for people with Alzheimer's disease. If we can show in this preclinical model of obstructive sleep apnoea and Alzheimer's disease that these neurons can be stopped from dying in obstructive sleep apnoea, then this molecule might very rapidly be able to be given to people with sleep apnoea to stop their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
One of the really exciting findings of our previous work was finding the link between obstructive sleep apnoea and the risk for Alzheimer's disease, but with this funding from Dementia Australia Research Foundation, we can take it the next step to very exciting work where we can test drugs that can prevent these neurons from dying. So, these drugs can be used both in people with obstructive sleep apnoea, potentially in the future to stop them from developing Alzheimer's disease, but also it targets those same neurons that the current drugs that are given to people with Alzheimer's disease, it might be able to replace them. Those current drugs just treat the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, but the drugs we are trialling would actually stop the cell death and maybe be able to halt the progress of dementia.
Doing preclinical research in Alzheimer's disease is really quite expensive, and we know it's a very challenging environment at the moment for getting research funding. So, it's really important that there are opportunities such as the money from Dementia Australia Research Foundation to be able to support this sort of research, and to be able to support early career researchers in this field.
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This research is supported by:
Dementia Australia Research Foundation Project Grant
School of Biomedical Sciences, The University of Queensland
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[Title card]
Dementia Australia Research Foundation:
A cure is just the beginning
If you would like to see dementia research make real impact, donate today:
1300 636 679
www.dementia.org.au/donate-research
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