Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Let's talk about alpha-Synuclein

I literally try not to look for research anymore. Either it's really good and I have to follow up on it for days, or it's stupid and I get annoyed. Anyhow, sometime last year I did a Pubmed search on Narcolepsy just to see what was new. This article came up.

Absence of ubiquitinated inclusions in hypocretin neurons of patients with narcolepsy


That statement is a basic refutation of my hypothesis.
I terrified me so much I couldn't even click on it. I was pretty sick at the time and it totally panicked me. I let it ruminate in the back of my head for a while before I actually read the article.
I wondered a lot why none of you sent it to me. It took me about 9 months to see it. Still to this day nobody has. I wonder if the people who read it just dismiss me and move on... but then again most of you are probably too cognitively impaired to even look it up.
Anyhow while I got used to the idea I realized we could both be right.
If you read the article you will see the narcoleptic brains had very few orexin cells to begin with. 96 total in all patients. Most narcoleptics' orexin cells are gone long before they die. Nonetheless, those that were left did not show alpha-Synuclein aggregation.
However, my suspicion about the experiment turned out to be warranted. If you read it closely, you will notice that the counts were taken from cell bodies in the hypothalamus. The real problem with the experiment is that alpha-Synuclein and Lewy Bodies accumulate in the axon terminals and kill the cell from there. The axon terminals of orexin cells are in the digestive tract, not the hypothalamus.

I may be wrong about the alpha-synuclein hypothesis. But this experiment doesn't prove it.
A further experiment is warranted to conclusively determine if alpha-Synuclein aggregation is a factor in narcolepsy.