Watching a brain breathe and burn energy at once — a new window on Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's disease changes two things at once: how brain cells make energy, and how much oxygen reaches them. Until now, scientists mostly had to study those one at a time. A team in Ammasi Periasamy's group at the University of Virginia combined two kinds of advanced microscopy to watch both together in the living brain — measuring cell metabolism and blood oxygen in the same tissue at the same moment. In mice bred to model Alzheimer's, published in Neurophotonics, they saw the two change in step: signs of altered energy production in cells alongside lower oxygen in the brain's blood vessels, suggesting the tissue was drawing more oxygen as its energy machinery shifted. The work is in mice, so it does not prove the same pattern occurs in people — what it gives researchers is a new instrument: a way to watch the earliest energy changes of the disease as they happen, which is where future treatments would need to act.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation