Scientists from the University of Arizona might have found an early detection method for some forms of dementia.
They found that patients with a rare neurodegenerative brain disorder called primary progressive aphasia, or PPA, show abnormalities in brain function in areas that look structurally normal on an MRI scan.
The research is published in Neuropsychologia and was conducted by Aneta Kielar et al.
In the study, the team wanted to see how degeneration affects the function of the brain.
They discovered that the brain showed functional defects in regions that were not yet showing structural damage on MRI.
Structural MRI provides 3D visualization of brain structure, which is useful when studying patients with diseases that literally cause brain cells to wither away, such as PPA.
Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, on the other hand, gives researchers really good spatial precision as to where the brain response originates.
The team compared brain scans of patients with PPA to healthy controls while both groups performed language tasks. The researchers also imaged participants’ brains while at rest.
The functional defects were related to worse performance in the tasks, as individuals with PPA lose their ability to speak or understand language while other aspects of cognition are typically preserved.
The team says identifying the discrepancy between a PPA brain’s structural and functional integrity could be an early-detection method for dementia.
This is promising because many drugs designed to treat dementia are proving to be not really effective and that might be because we’re detecting the brain damage too late.
The team acknowledges that this was a small study, which is partly because PPA is such a rare form of dementia, and that further investigation is necessary.
They hope to uncover why this structural and functional mismatch is happening in PPA brains.
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If you care about dementia risk, please read studies about how to sleep to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, and this drug may help treat Lewy body dementia.
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