Continuing a trend of unlikely players, the paper “Targeting dysregulation of brain iron homeostasis in Parkinsons’ disease by iron chelators” tells us the story of how too much metal can mess up our brain. Now, iron is an important part of our diet. It’s the most important part of our blood, helps us bulk up on muscle, but unfortunately it’s a bit too easy to get too much of it in our brains. See, most of the time our bodies maintain what’s called homeostasis. Basically it means each part of our body works to keep the right levels of the right stuff in the right place. When that goes awry, we get problems. In this case, problems with iron homeostasis in the brain. Normally it’s used for everything from neurotransmission to DNA synthesis, but as we age it accumulates. In Parkinson’s disease, the major issue is that neurons in the region called the substantia nigra die off. Coincidentally, the substantia nigra of Parkinson’s patients tends to have elevated levels of iron. It takes on some abnormal electrical states as well, which generates free radicals and cause the misfolding of a protein called alpha synuclein, which is known to be involved in Parkinson’s.
So now that we’ve laid out a nice big problem, what do we have for solutions? They’re called chelators, and they’re substances that can bind metal ions in a way that makes it easier for our bodies to get rid of them. A major source of good iron chelators is green tea. It’s full of catechins, which are molecules with a lot of carbon rings that allow them to surround ions like iron so the normal homeostasis mechanisms can sweep it away.
Iron on the brain
