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The Role of Astrocytes in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression

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Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering (IWBBIO 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNBI,volume 13346))

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Abstract

Astrocytes are a particular type of glial cells observed throughout the gray matter in the brain. In a healthy brain, they help to defend evolutionarily conserved astrogliosis programs and maintain neuronal metabolism. On the other hand, in the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affected brain, they release neurotoxins because of the adopting behaviours of different functions depending on the disease progression. Along with astrocytes, amyloid-beta (A\(\beta \)) and tau proteins (\(\tau \)P) play a prominent role in AD. In this paper, we have developed a model and have studied the dual action of astrocytes with A\(\beta \), \(\tau \)P, and their toxic forms in the brain connectome. Initial conditions-dependent solutions of the model demonstrate that the treatment depends on AD’s status at the first diagnosis time. With an increase in the clearance rate of toxic A\(\beta \) by the astrocytes, the model predicts a cure possibility from AD. Furthermore, the network model with non-uniform parameter values in different regions, developed here, provides a better insight into the distributions of the concentrations in the brain connectome.

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Acknowledgements

Authors are grateful to the NSERC and the CRC Program for their support. RM is also acknowledging support of the BERC 2022–2025 program and Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (AEI) BCAM Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2017–0718 and the Basque Government fund AI in BCAM EXP. 2019/00432. This research was enabled in part by support provided by SHARCNET (www.sharcnet.ca) and Digital Research Alliance of Canada (www.alliancecan.ca).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. M3AI Laboratory, MS2Discovery Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5, Canada

    Swadesh Pal & Roderick Melnik

  2. BCAM - Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, 48009, Bilbao, Spain

    Roderick Melnik

Authors
  1. Swadesh Pal
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  2. Roderick Melnik
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Correspondence to Roderick Melnik .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Marcelina Siebold Guest Relations Dept., University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Ignacio Rojas

  2. Faculty of Sciences, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Olga Valenzuela

  3. ETSIIT. CITIC-UGR, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Fernando Rojas

  4. ETSIIT, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Luis Javier Herrera

  5. University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Francisco Ortuño

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Pal, S., Melnik, R. (2022). The Role of Astrocytes in Alzheimer’s Disease Progression. In: Rojas, I., Valenzuela, O., Rojas, F., Herrera, L.J., Ortuño, F. (eds) Bioinformatics and Biomedical Engineering. IWBBIO 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13346. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07704-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07704-3_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-07703-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-07704-3

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