UC Merced Connect: Is copper in water and Alzheimer’s linked?

UC Merced professor Masashi Kitazawa wants to figure out if any environmental factors increase the risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, specifically, whether elevated levels of copper in drinking water play a role.

A new $2.6 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences will fund his research, making what was a side project into a full-blown exploration.

“Copper is an essential metal, but too much will cause problems,” Kitazawa said. “I want to see if the environmentally relevant levels of copper in drinking water will have any impacts on the brain and its functions.”

Kitazawa and the students in his lab are researching the links between copper and Alzheimer's disease.

The EPA sets a limit of 1.3 parts per million of copper per liter of drinking water. In some places, older copper plumbing pipes can be a source of higher levels of copper in water, for example. But water in Merced is well below the EPA’s limit, Kitazawa said.

He hopes five years will be enough time to conduct all the experiments he wants to perform with a research colleague at Tufts University and analyze all the data.

The researchers are looking at two different brain cells to see how copper affects them, and their results could add to the growing body of data about the neurodegenerative disease.

One of the main markers for Alzheimer’s, which affects an estimated 5.2 million Americans, is the presence of amyloid-beta deposits in the brain. They are leftovers of proteins and polypeptides that every individual has in the brain.

In most people, certain cells act as the body’s or brain’s garbage collectors and get rid of “junk” – broken links of protein chains – that shouldn’t be there. But in some people, they don’t function as they are supposed to.

The accumulation of amyloid-beta is believed to be an initial cause of Alzheimer’s.

“We want to find out whether copper accelerates the accumulation or affects the ability of those cells to clean amyloid-beta from the brain,” Kitazawa said.

It’s not known what role environmental factors play in Alzheimer’s, though there are indications that certain things reduce risk, including exercise, healthy eating and stimulating brain activity such as reading, playing chess and bilingualism, among others.

“Exposure to some metals, or elevated levels, can significantly impact human health,” Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development Sam Traina said. “Professor Kitazawa’s work on a potential linkage between excessive copper exposure and Alzheimer’s is extremely important.”

This story was originally published November 4, 2014 at 5:33 PM with the headline "UC Merced Connect: Is copper in water and Alzheimer’s linked?."