A 16 Years Old's Fight Against Alzheimers by Madison

A 16 Years Old's Fight Against Alzheimers by Madison - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

Beginning in my Sophomore Year of High School, I started a project in my Biomedical Science's course that would open my eyes to a little known topic called lipofuscin. Lipofuscin is a yellow-brown pigmented byproduct of cell oxidation that can accumulate around the nucleus of a cell and slow its effeciency. It is currently known that lipofuscin is the accumulation of lysosomes, which have absorbed the worn-out, indigestible parts of the cell. There is very little information that exists about lipofuscin, and there has been very little research done focusing on the topic.
Lipofuscin occurs in all people, but no one has a complete understanding of the pigment itself, the accumulation, or the diseases that can arise from it. It is important to understand that lipofuscin cannot cause, but can serve as an aiding factor in Macular Degeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease, which are all age related degenerative diseases that result from the inefficiency of specific cells in the body.
This in mind, the project that I conducted took a look at the accumulation of this pigment in the presence of a common antioxidant, Vitamin E. Vitamin E products the cell from free radicals, which damage the cell, and therefore it is much less likely for the cell to accumulation lipofuscin, when Vitamin E is present. When vitamin E was implemented in a group of rat's diet, they had significantly less lipofuscin accumulation in their tissues than the control group with a normal diet.
At the end of 2 years of conducting studies on this topic, my scientific poster of the results was recognized by the Senate and House of Representatives in my state. While this in itself is hugely rewarding, it is more rewarding to see that more and more light is being shed on the little known topic of lipofuscin.