Could This Algae Bloom Toxin Be a Cause of Alzheimer’s, ALS?

Could This Algae Bloom Toxin Be a Cause of Alzheimer’s, ALS?  http://bit.ly/1QpeDUn  

A group of villagers on the Pacific isle of Guam have given researchers substantial insight into an environmental toxin found in algae blooms that may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Paul Alan Cox, Ph.D., an ethnobotanist currently at the Institute for EthnoMedicine in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and a team of researchers visited the island in the late 1990s to interview Chamorro villagers who were suffering from a disease very similar to Parkinson’s, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and Alzheimer’s disease. The disease first caught the attention of the U.S. military in the 1950s.

Scientists also noticed that, when villagers afflicted the disease died, their brains were found to be clogged with the same type of amyloid protein clumps and tangles of neural fibers found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients.

For 20 years, scientists worked to determine the cause, but to no avail.

The disease didn’t appear to be hereditary, and Dr. Ralph Garruto of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) noted that when outsiders moved in with Chamorro families, they often developed the disease.