Urbanc B. Cruz L. Buldyrev S V. Havlin S. Irizarry M C. Stanley H E [a]. Hyman B T. Dynamics of plaque formation in Alzheimer's disease. Biophysical Journal. 76(3). March, 1999. 1330-1334.

Abstract

Plaques that form in the brains of Alzheimer patients are made of deposits of the amyloid-beta peptide. We analyze the time evolution of amyloid-beta deposition in immunostained brain slices from transgenic mice. We find that amyloid-beta deposits appear in clusters whose characteristic size increases from 14 mum in 8-month-old mice to 22 mum in 12-month-old mice. We show that the clustering has implications for the biological growth of amyloid-beta by presenting a growth model that accounts for the experimentally observed structure of individual deposits and predicts the formation of clusters of deposits and their time evolution.




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