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How just one horrible moment in your past could cause ALZHEIMER'S, according to new study
Horrible moments in life don't just bring on added stress, but a new study has found one such event could even raise your risk for developing Alzheimer's.
Scientists found that if someone had a traumatic experience, such as a divorce or death, at a young age they were more likely to have symptoms of disease than those who had skated through unscathed.
By taking samples from participants spinal fluid, they found that people with more stress had more of the kinds of proteins floating around their body that are associated with Alzheimer's disease than those without it.
A researched noted that this only holds true if these stressful events took place in your childhood or middle-age,
The new paper found that stress in early through middle life was linked to a higher likelihood of developing dementia.
Despite decades of dedicated research, and the fact that nearly seven million Americans currently live with Alzheimer's, scientists haven't settled on a cause for the disease.
There's some evidence it could be caused by genes and some evidence it could be related to environment.
But researchers do know that when someone is developing Alzheimer's, their body starts producing a lot more of two types of proteins that are natural to the body - called amyloid and tau.
Since the brain is connected to the spinal cord, you can take fluid from the spinal cavity to figure out if your brain is producing more of these proteins.
This may be an accurate way to detect Alzheimer's disease a 2018 study of 1,016 patients by Columbia University concluded.
That's the test that the Spanish researchers did in their new paper, which was published in the American Neurological Association's Annals of Neurology.
By testing the spinal fluid of the 1,290 participants, the researchers discovered that people who had gone through a stressful event in their early or mid life had higher amounts of amyloid and tau.
Carol Opdebeeck, a senior lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, wrote in The Conversation that is evidence that 'stressful life events, such as the death of a loved one or divorce, put a person at greater risk of developing dementia in later life'.
Markers like amyloid and tau build up in the brains of people with Alzheimers. This can be measured by taking samples of spinal fluid.
The researchers provide a number of explanations for their findings.
First, they said, anxiety in response to stressful events is common. Scientists know that anxiety and stress are bad for your body.
When you're stressed, your immune system reacts like you've been injured, and you get inflammation all over your body, which can accelerate aging, Dr Susan Albers a psychologist at Cleveland Clinic said.
Second, stressful events can cause your body to release a certain kind of steroid, called glucocorticoids, which in high amounts have been shown to harm brain cells.
Finally, when animals are put in stressful environments, they have a harder time digesting amyloid and tau, the researchers wrote.
Whatever caused their findings, the researchers wrote that there still needs to be more work done to understand if it's applicable across the board.
For her part, Professor Opdebeeck wrote that the study could help us better understand how dementia develops and in turn, 'will help to find effective ways to intervene early, and possibly even reduce the number of people who develop dementia'.