Alzheimer's May Be Diabetes-Like Illness

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Whether restoring insulin to the brain can slow or reverse the progression of Alzheimer's is something that de la Monte's team is looking at now in animals. "The results are under review," she said.

"We are looking at a brain form of diabetes," de la Monte said. "One can look forward to approaches that may work in the brain which we already have available, or that might be modified to treat patients with neurodegeneration," she said.

De la Monte is convinced that what doctors call Alzheimer's is really several different conditions under one umbrella. "We will have to develop ways to be certain who has what kind of neurodegeneration," she said.

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About 50 percent of patients diagnosed with dementia have Alzheimer's, de la Monte noted. "The others have a mixed condition or something else wrong with them," she said.

"There are a number of conditions that people call Alzheimer's disease," de la Monte said. "People are developing ways of testing insulin resistance in the brain, which will be necessary to validate any therapy that comes out of this."

However, one expert doesn't think that her team has yet made a convincing case for the theory.

"The paper overreaches," said Gandy.

He noted that de la Monte's group injected the rats' brains with Streptozotocin, the compound they used to inhibit local insulin production. So, it's not clear whether the brain changes her group noted were related to a lack of insulin, or this insult to the brain. "Streptozotocin, which causes oxidative stress, would be predicted to cause such stress in many tissues, including the brain," Gandy said.

In addition, changes the researchers observed in the brains of the mice were only modest, with no clear structural pathology evident, he said.

Another expert believes insulin's role in Alzheimer's may only be part of the picture.

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