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.
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