The first hints about cellular debris came almost a century ago, when psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer studied the brains of demented patients after death and found them clogged with strange deposits he dubbed amyloid plaques.

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"By leaving these rats you will be condemning millions of young seabirds to die a pretty terrible death, having their brains eaten out by rats in perpetuity, " he said.

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When she created a strain of mice with the presenilin genes missing in their brains, the mice developed dementia and brain cell death just like Alzheimer's sufferers, but the mice had no amyloid deposits.

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The researchers studied the brains of 27 children, of which 19 died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), and eight from other conditions.

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