Diseases that affect the brain, like Alzheimer’s and dementia, often start changing the brain long before people start to feel unwell.
This makes these diseases very tricky to catch early on.
But catching them early could mean better treatments and maybe even a chance to stop the diseases. A team of scientists from Japan may have found a new way to do just that.
New Ways to Spot Early Changes
The scientists, from the University of Tsukuba, have discovered changes in the brain that could help doctors tell if someone is starting to get diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia.
They published their findings in a scientific journal called Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
Sometimes, people can start to have small problems with thinking or memory. This could be a sign of many brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s, or dementia with Lewy bodies, where unusual protein bits build up in the brain.
But it’s hard to tell which disease someone might have, just based on these early symptoms. That’s why the Tsukuba team wanted to find a way to tell these diseases apart, early on.
“We know about some signs that could tell us if someone has mild memory problems,” said Professor Tetsuaki Arai, the senior author of the study.
“But finding these signs often needs special brain scanners. We wanted to find a way to spot these problems using regular MRI scans, which are common in hospitals.”
Studying Brain Connections
To do this, the scientists used an approach that looks at how different parts of the brain are connected.
They looked at small changes in the brains of people who had mild memory problems because of Alzheimer’s, and those who had memory problems because of Lewy body dementia.
“We were surprised by what we found,” said Professor Miho Ota, the lead author of the study. “We found strange network patterns in certain parts of the brain in people with Alzheimer’s.
But in people with Lewy body dementia, we saw these changes in different parts of the brain. We didn’t see these changes in healthy people.”
These changes in brain networks showed up even before the brain started to lose its gray matter, a sign of brain disease.
A Potential Breakthrough
“We have found a way to spot changes in brain networks in people with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia,” said Professor Arai.
“These changes can tell us which disease someone might have. This approach might be better than looking at changes in gray matter, which is what we usually do.”
Because MRI scans are widely available in hospitals, this new approach could make it easier to spot and compare brain changes in people with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia.
So, this new way of studying brain networks might be the key to catching these diseases early. And it might open the door to better treatments for people with these diseases.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, please read studies about Vitamin D deficiency linked to Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, and Oral cannabis extract may help reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about Vitamin B9 deficiency linked to higher dementia risk, and results showing flavonoid-rich foods could improve survival in Parkinson’s disease.
The study was published in Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
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