Brain Scans May One Day Be Used to Predict Dementia

TUESDAY, Feb. 14 (HealthDay News) — Using brain scans,
researchers were able to monitor mental decline over a two-year period in
people without dementia and even predict the disorder before it happened,
according to a new report.

Scientists may one day be able to use brain scans to track the
effectiveness of medications designed to treat Alzheimer’s disease. This
brain-robbing disorder currently has no cure, and its progression cannot
be halted by medication either.

The scans can detect a chemical marker developed by the researchers
that binds to plaques — a kind of brain gunk — and “tangles,” which are
both linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The investigators tested the
effectiveness of the method on 43 healthy study participants, whose
average age was 64. Nearly half of the volunteers had a form of memory
loss called “mild cognitive impairment.”

The study findings are published in the February issue of the
Archives of Neurology.

“We are finding that this may be a useful neuroimaging marker that can
detect changes early, before symptoms appear, and it may be helpful in
tracking changes in the brain over time,” study author Dr. Gary Small, a
professor of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human
Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a
university news release.

The researchers found that they were able to link scan results to
mental decline after two years, and were even able to use findings from
the initial scans to predict some kinds of brain decline in the
participants two years later.

The next step is to use the scans to study the effectiveness of
medications designed to treat brain aging, and therapies used to try to
delay or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, Small explained in the news release.

In response to the question of whether the scans could be useful for
patients right now, Catherine Roe, a research assistant professor of
neurology and Alzheimer’s specialist at Washington University in St.
Louis, who was not involved with the study, pointed out that doctors have
other ways to detect mental decline, and there’s still no preventive
treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet, “although I don’t think this technology is ready to be applied in
doctors’ offices right now, I think it would be useful clinically in
helping to determine what the underlying cause of the [mental] decline is,
whether it’s Alzheimer’s or something else,” Roe said.

More information

For more about Alzheimer’s disease, visit the U.S. National Library of
Medicine.

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