Research identifies the role of karyoptosis in progressive brain cell loss
A paper published in Nature Communications has described how a process known as karyoptosis can lead to the progressive brain cell loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD).
Karyoptosis is a unique form of cell death that causes the cell’s nucleus to shrink and break apart before the cell dies. Researchers from King’s College London (in collaboration with the UK Dementia Research Institute) examined around 3,000 brain cells from 28 patients and found signs of karyoptosis in more than one-third of cells in the frontal cortex of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, just 15 per cent of cells in healthy older brains showed signs of karyoptosis.
Dr Manolis Fanto, Reader in Functional Genomics, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, says:
“Our study is important for the understanding of dementia because it clarifies that there are multiple ways in which neurons die and the one specifically characterised by us, karyoptosis, was entirely unknown before. This information draws a new picture of the pathways that must be acted upon to keep the brain cells alive in dementia.”
Dr Sara Rodrigues, Senior Research Manager at Alzheimer’s Research UK (one of the funders of this research) says:
“For decades, we’ve known that toxic proteins build up in Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia, but exactly how they lead to the loss of brain cells has remained unclear.
The identification of karyoptosis is a crucial step towards finding targets for treatments that could stop or slow cell loss.”
You can read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-73802-w
Commentary from King’s College London is here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/new-mechanism-found-for-neuronal-death-inalzheimers-and-frontotemporal-dementia