Researchers find new method for determining potential for Alzheimer's disease

 

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Carol Forsloff - With the growing number of Alzheimer's patients in the world, researchers are looking at ways of early identification and early treatment, with a new research study that shows promise for doing that.

What the University of California at Davis has found is that abnormal brain images combined with examination of the composition of the fluid that surrounds the spine present early signs of identifying older adults with seeming good health overall who are at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease well before memory and cognitive problems become obvious.

"Our findings indicate that a distinctive pattern of imaging and biomarker deviations from typical adults may be an early warning sign of neurobiological pathology and an early sign of Alzheimer's disease," said Laurel Beckett, a professor of public health sciences at UC Davis and the lead study author. "By the time people get diagnosed with Alzheimer's using cognitive tests, there's already a lot of brain damage. We hope that in the future methods that combine brain imaging and biomarker assessments can push the diagnosis back, while learning more about the mechanisms causing Alzheimer's disease, so we can develop better treatments."

For the study,  researchers utilized data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, that includes brain scans, clinical data and other laboratory results from spinal fluid and blood tests from more than 800 older adults. Some study participants presented with an apparent good cognitive health, others with mild cognitive impairment, a condition that often precedes Alzheimer's, and others with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers analyzed data from 220 normal older adults who had undergone structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and clinical examinations. About half also provided spinal fluid samples. Among the 96 participants, cluster analysis identified three distinct subgroups of individuals based solely on their baseline imaging and laboratory measures.

 During the next three years, few of these healthy people showed any cognitive change. But cognitive tests for people in one of the subgroups — about 10 percent of the sample — declined at nearly five times the rate as healthy older adults. The researchers believe this group with the most extreme MRI and spinal fluid measurements, may represent the earliest stages of subclinical cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease.

Beckett and his fellow researchers indicate that this type of imaging and fluid biomarkers can be helpful in assessing who is at risk for Alzheimers and cognitive decline and also can serve as a means of determining whether new treatments are able to slow the rate of decline and are effective.said that the finding is an important step toward discovering the constellation of imaging and fluid biomarkers that foreshadow cognitive decline, as well as a means of determining whether new treatments are effective.

"The problem with current clinical trials is that we don't know who is on the edge of experiencing dementia. And even if we did, how would we know if a treatment was working, since they haven't shown any clinical problems?" Beckett said. "This method could improve clinical trials for prevention and reduce the numbers of study participants necessary to speed drug discovery — and eventually change how the pharmaceutical industry and National Institutes of Health conduct Alzheimer's disease clinical trials."