Scientists may soon be able to scan for Alzheimer's disease years before the onset of symptoms using a computer program that measures metabolic activity in the brain, researchers revealed here.
"This is the first demonstration that reduced metabolic activity in the hippocampus may be used to predict future Alzheimer's disease," said Lisa Mosconi of New York University's School of Medicine, who led the research and developed the technology.
"Although our findings need to be replicated in other studies, our technique offers the possibility that we will be able to screen for Alzheimer's in individuals who aren't cognitively impaired," she said. "It's accurate in 85 percent of the cases."
Mosconi presented her work on Sunday before the first-ever International Conference on Prevention of Dementia, which runs through today.
The new technique builds on years of research by psychiatrist Mony de Leon, director of the Center for Brain Health, who demonstrated, using tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, that the size of the hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with memory and learning, shrinks as Alzheimer's progresses.
Mosconi studied 53 healthy people aged 54 to 80 over periods of nine to 24 years, using scans to measure the volume of glucose used by their brains.
Thanks to the technique, "right now, we can show with great accuracy who will develop Alzheimer's nine years in advance of symptoms, and our projections suggest we might be able to take that out as far as 15 years," said de Leon, whose related research was financed by the National Institutes of Health.
"Our basic results will need to be replicated in other studies and expanded to include PET scans data from diverse patients groups, but we're confident this is a strong beginning, demonstrating accurate detection of early Alzheimer's disease," he said.
"Now we have a better tool to examine disease progression, and we anticipate this might open some doors to prevention treatment strategies," he said.
Another study presented on Sunday, of 1,800 elderly Americans of Japanese ancestry, showed that those who drank fruit or vegetable juice at least three times a week were four times less likely to develop Alzheimer's.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS