Diagnosis and monitoring of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could be radically improved by a new method of quantifying sub-regional brain-volume loss using MRI scans.
Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have compared MRI scans taken over several months to identify changes in the brain’s memory regions, and demonstrated that these measures outperform the available means of tracking the early stages of AD.
Using brain changes for accurate diagnosis and monitoring of the disease has only recently been made possible through computational algorithms that automate identification of brain structures with MRI. This allows change in specific brain sub-regions to be measured across time.
The researchers measured the rates of sub-regional cerebral volume change in nearly 300 patients with mild cognitive impairment, 169 healthy controls and 129 subjects with AD. They found that changes in the brain’s memory regions provide a sensitive measure of the early stages of AD.
“The technique is extremely powerful, because it allows a researcher to examine exactly how much brain-volume loss has occurred in each region of the brain,” said neurologist and study co-author James Brewer, MD, PhD. “The new findings suggest that global measures of brain shrinkage are less sensitive than regional measures for detecting the changes specific to Alzheimer’s disease.”