Diseases that affect the brain, like Alzheimer’s and dementia, can start changing the brain long before a person feels sick.
This makes them hard to catch early. But finding these diseases early could lead to better treatments—or even stop them from getting worse.
Now, a team of scientists from the University of Tsukuba in Japan may have found a new way to do just that.
The researchers discovered changes in the brain that could help doctors know if someone is starting to get diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia. Their study was published in the journal Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
Sometimes, people begin to have small problems with memory or thinking. These issues might be early signs of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s or dementia with Lewy bodies. In Lewy body dementia, strange protein clumps build up in the brain.
The tricky part is figuring out which disease is causing the symptoms. It’s hard to know early on just from the symptoms alone. That’s why the scientists in Tsukuba wanted to find new ways to tell these diseases apart early.
“We already know some signs that show if someone has memory problems,” said Professor Tetsuaki Arai, the senior author of the study. “But finding these signs usually needs special brain scans that many hospitals don’t have. We wanted to use regular MRI scans, which are easier to find.”
To do this, the team looked at how different parts of the brain are connected. They compared the brains of people with early Alzheimer’s symptoms and people with early signs of Lewy body dementia.
“We were surprised by what we saw,” said Professor Miho Ota, the lead author. “In people with Alzheimer’s, certain parts of the brain had unusual network patterns. But in people with Lewy body dementia, the changes were in other brain areas. We didn’t see these changes in healthy people.”
These brain network changes appeared before the brain started to lose its gray matter—a common sign of brain disease. That means these changes might help catch the disease even earlier than current methods.
Professor Arai explained that this new way of looking at brain networks might help doctors figure out which disease a person has. Right now, many doctors focus on gray matter loss, but that can come too late. This brain connection method could be more useful for early diagnosis.
Since MRI machines are common in hospitals, this discovery might make it easier to check brain health in more people. It could also help doctors choose the right treatments sooner.
This research offers hope. By finding brain diseases earlier, we might be able to slow them down or manage them better.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, check out studies showing that vitamin D deficiency is linked to Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia, and that cannabis extract might reduce Alzheimer’s symptoms.
For more about brain health, look into recent studies showing that vitamin B9 deficiency can raise the risk of dementia, and that flavonoid-rich foods might help people with Parkinson’s disease live longer.
If you care about Alzheimer’s, please read studies about Scientists find the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease and findings of Alzheimer’s might not be primarily a brain disease. A new theory suggests it’s an autoimmune condition.
For more information about Alzheimer’s disease, please read studies about These places in U.S. have the most cases of Alzheimer’s disease and findings of Scientists confirm the link between COVID-19 and Alzheimer’s disease.
The study was published in Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders.
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