Imagine if you could prevent Alzheimer’s just by drinking more green tea, or if you could find out years in advance whether you’ve got a risk of the disease. From the discovery of new ways to predict the disease to the testing of new dementia medications, the recent research landscape has provided a range of exciting and hopeful news for Alzheimer’s disease sufferers and their loved ones.

In studies released earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, green tea extract and cocoa polyphenols both provided a protective effect against the formation of beta-amyloid plaques in the brain. it was found that EGCG interacted with metal–Aβ species and formed small, unstructured Aβ aggregates more noticeably than in metal-free conditions in vitro. In addition, upon incubation with EGCG, the toxicity presented by metal-free Aβ and metal–Aβ was mitigated in living cells.

To understand this reactivity at the molecular level, structural insights were obtained by ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS), 2D NMR spectroscopy, and computational methods. These studies indicated that (i) EGCG was bound to Aβ monomers and dimers, generating more compact peptide conformations than those from EGCG-untreated Aβ species; and (ii) ternary EGCG–metal–Aβ complexes were produced. Thus, we demonstrate the distinct antiamyloidogenic reactivity of EGCG toward metal–Aβ species with a structure-based mechanism.