By Caribbean Medical News Staff
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) research team has made a monumental breakthrough in the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease. After six years of steadfast research, the team has validated the first standardized protocol for measuring one of the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease: the atrophy of the part of the brain known as the hippocampus.
The discovery marks the last chapter in a worldwide syndicate’s successful effort to develop a unified and steadfast approach to assessing signs of Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration through structural imaging tests, a staple in the diagnosis and monitoring of the disease.
With the brain tissue of deceased Alzheimer’s disease patients, a group headed by Dr. Liana Apostolova, Director of the neuroimaging laboratory at the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at UCLA, confirmed that the newly established method for measuring hippocampal atrophy in structural MRI tests correlates with the pathologic changes that are known to be characteristics of the disease- the progressive development of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain.
“This hippocampal protocol will now become the gold standard in the field, adopted by many if not all research groups across the globe in their study of Alzheimer’s disease. It will serve as a powerful tool in clinical trials for measuring the efficacy of new drugs in slowing or halting disease progression,” said Dr Apostolova.
The hippocampus is a small area of the brain that is associated with memory formation, and memory loss is the earliest clinical feature of Alzheimer’s disease. Its shrinkage or atrophy, as determined by a structural MRI exam, is a well-established biomarker for the disease and is commonly used in both clinical and research settings to diagnose the disease and monitor its progression.
“The technique is meant to be used on scans of living human subjects, so it’s important that we are absolutely certain that this methodology measures what it is supposed to and captures disease presence accurately,” stressed Apostolova.
In order to accomplish this, her group used a powerful 7 Tesla MRI scanner to take images of the brain specimens of 16 deceased individuals — nine who had Alzheimer’s disease and seven who were cognitively normal — each for 60 hours. This method provided extraordinary visualization of the hippocampal tissue, Dr Apostolova added.
She said that, “as a result of the years of scientifically rigorous work of this consortium, hippocampal atrophy can finally be reliably and reproducibly established from structural MRI scans.”
Even though the technique can be used straight away in research settings such as clinical trials, the next step will be to use the standardized protocol to validate automated techniques available for measuring the hippocampus so the approach could be used more widely. This includes the diagnosis of the Alzheimer’s disease in doctor’s offices and other healthcare sites, said Apostolova.
