When Dena Dubal was hired as assistant professor of neurology by the University of California in 2011, she dedicated herself to understanding Klotho, a mysterious hormone and set up a laboratory towards the cause. This act was fueled by her intuition that it might be a way to finding an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s, Dementia and other aging brain disorders. As at then, scientists knew little about Klotho and were greatly fascinated by it.
Before then, scientists had found Klotho in the brain and mice bred to make extra Klotho lived 30% longer than their counterparts. Thus, Dr. Dubal focused her research on how Klotho affects Mice ability to learn and recall memories. The research yielded startling results as she alongside her team members discovered Klotho is capable of protecting Mice with symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease from memory degeneration. Every of their thinking was preserved as much as could be measured. The healthy mice that were also bred to produce extra Klotho were better at learning mazes and other cognitive evaluations.
It was thus concluded that Klotho not only protects their brain but also enhances it.
It’s a whopping five years after the team started publishing their results and since then, other researches who began working on Klotho after that have stated juicy finding of how Klotho might be useful in managing other neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.
Presently, Dr. Dubal alongside other medical and scientific researchers are working towards developing a treatment with Klotho. They hope when Klotho is injected into the body, or its production is induced in the brain, diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia will be treated successfully.
Although there is currently no conclusive improvement towards this path as the researchers themselves are not assured of its success while other experts believe they are still a long way towards fully understanding how Klotho affects the brain, it is a massive relief towards understanding there is work in progress towards eradicating some neurological diseases. It is more relaxing knowing it is all about using a hormone produced in the brain to treat the brain’s degeneration.
Presently, no human subject has been used in the research as the researchers regard it as a considerable risk.
