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This team over at UCLA has advanced the notion that iron in the brain may propel neurodegeneration of all sorts.

Metals have a special place in biology by virtue of their very distinct chemistry. They are not "one-shot" deals like hydrogen peroxide or superoxide that can be dismutated. They are quasi-permanent loci of "slippery electrons". In other words, electrons "get themselves into trouble" whenever they hit a transition metal like iron, and may "zap" themselves into a radical in the special context of a metal. If you keep feeding electrons to the metal, it keeps zapping them into radicals, a kind of "liftoff pad"

Because of this, they are the "gift that keeps on giving". Too much will generate "runaway reductive chemistry". In that regard, they are capable of frying neurons. Men have more iron in the blood, more iron in the brain, and an earlier onset of neurodegenerative disease.

Ferritin is a molecule that "holds" iron in biological systems. This team at UCLA has determined that a MRI scan is a valid way of assessing how much iron, held in ferritin, that you have in your brain at any given time. Their hypothesis is that by determining how much ferritin is in your brain, they could "predict" how quickly your nervous system may decline in the immediate and distant future.

Of course, neurodegeneration is going to be a multifactorial phenomenon, but, this could be a useful and important way of assisting in the determination of individual risk of neurodegeneration. Furthermore, this entire research front calls attention to the possibility of therapeutic interventions, adminstered at an early stage, that may prevent the tragic outcome of excess iron burden. Some of the possible ways iron-related pathology could be mitigated seen in the literature this team at UCLA mentions include curcurmin, nicotine, and even iron chelation therapy.

Another question that is raised by this research is what is role played by "peripheral ferritin", or, ferritin circulating OUTSIDE of your brain? This peripheral ferritin may "feed" into the brain iron, and if this is true, it could indicate that excessive dietary iron could also contribute to neurodegeneration. However, it is important to keep in mind that there are "many steps" in the distribution of iron, and the dietary iron in the GI tract has to be "passed along" a considerable number of steps to reach the final destination of the brain. In this regard, this article emphasizes that much is unknown.

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