Do stalls also occur in Vascular Dementia?

[pietro]

One of our Catchers recently sent me this apt question by email:

“Do these stalls that occur in blood vessels in Alzheimer’s Disease also occur in Vascular Dementia, and Lewy Body Dementia, or do the stalls only occur in Alzheimer’s Disease? I was thinking that they might also occur in Vascular Dementia because Vascular Dementia is a vascular disease, and we are dealing with blood flow in the movies.”

Naturally, I put the question to our biomedical collaborators, and this is what @Chris_Schaffer had to say:

We do not know. We are currently testing some mouse models of Lewy body dementia to see if there are higher numbers of stalled capillaries in the brain of these mice. There are not good mouse models of vascular dementia. We have tried to simulate this by feeding mice a high fat diet, but that is an imperfect model, at best. In these mice, we have seen initial evidence of increased numbers of stalled capillaries.

Speaking more speculatively, I believe that we are likely to find increased numbers of stalled capillaries in in the brain a broad range of conditions that increase vascular inflammation. This increase in vascular inflammation could come from systemic drivers (high blood pressure, obesity) or from brain-specific causes (amyloid beta aggregates in Alzheimer’s or alpha-synuclin aggregates in Lewy body dementia).