A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides evidence from both mouse models and postmortem human tissue of a direct link between two problems that emerge in Alzheimer’s disease: a buildup of double-stranded breaks (DSBs) in the DNA of neurons and the inflammatory behavior of microglia, the brain’s immune cells. A key new finding is that neurons actively trigger an inflammatory response to their genomic damage. Neurons have not been known to signal the brain’s immune system in Alzheimer’s disease, says study…
