To test the hypothesis Kelly and his colleagues began to examine the brains of Alzheimer's victims. They found evidence of a newly discovered substance termed 'atheronals'. Atheronals have only recently been discovered and refer to the way in which ozone reacts with normal metabolites to produce toxic compounds during inflammatory processes taking place in the body. Common diseases such as arterial hardening, or atherosclerosis, sometimes need surgical treatment. It has been shown that the hard substances removed all contain atheronals. As a result attention is beginning to focus of atheronals as significant in the development of diseases characterised by hardening processes.
Kelly and colleagues also performed experiments in the test tube and found that atheronals and lipid oxidation products have the ability to dramatically accelerate the misfolding of amyloid beta and to reduce the concentration of the protein needed for misfolding to take place to concentrations found in the brain.
Kelly admits it will be difficult to prove his inflammatory metabolite theory as they are hard to detect even years after the process of hardening has started. The search for a smoking gun is on but the important thing about this research is that it introduces an entirely new way of thinking about Alzheimer's. Conventional wisdom views Alzheimer's as a product of genetic or protein function. If Kelly's theory is correct, the cause of Alzheimer's will in some fashion, be due to inflammatory stress leading to metabolic changes in brain proteins. As with all science, only time will tell.
