According to a team of Japanese researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, they established metabolic compounds within the blood that are said to be associated with cognitive diseases, like dementia.
During the study, released in PNAS, researchers assessed samples of blood gathered from eight patients diagnosed with dementia, in addition to eight healthy counterparts. They also measured the levels of 124 metabolites in blood tests.
“A principal conclusion of this study is that plasma-enriched dementia factors, group A compounds, increased in dementia patients and might have a negative toxic impact on CNS functions by themselves or their degradation products,” the authors wrote in their results.
“Other group B to E metabolites may be beneficial for the CNS, as their quantity all declined in dementia patients. RBC-enriched group B metabolites all containing the trimethyl-ammonium ion may protect the CNS through their antioxidative and other unknown activity.”
“As these metabolites exist in human body fluids, they may be employed for studies of drug therapy. In the present study, 33 metabolites are obvious targets for future study, the majority of which have not been studied at all relative to their clinical potential,” the authors concluded in their PNAS article.
