Queen Mary University of London researchers have developed a new method to predict dementia with approximately 80% accuracy, nine years before the disease is diagnosed.
The research team, led by Professor Charles Marshall, analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of more than 1,100 volunteers from the UK Biobank, to detect changes in the cerebral network (DMN) that connects brain regions to perform specific cognitive functions, the first neural network Affected by Alzheimer's disease.
The researchers identified each patient with the possibility of dementia based on how well their effective communication pattern matched the pattern indicative of dementia.
They compared these probabilities with medical data for each patient, and the results showed that the developed model accurately predicted dementia 9 years before the official diagnosis was made.
The researchers also examined whether changes in the DMN might be caused by known risk factors for dementia. Their analysis showed that genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease was strongly associated with connectivity changes in the DMN, supporting the idea that these changes are specific to Alzheimer's disease.
They found that social isolation is likely to increase dementia risk through its effect on connectivity in the DMN.
Marshall said: “Predicting who will develop dementia in the future will be vital to developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes symptoms of dementia. We hope that the measure of brain function we have developed will allow us to be more precise about whether "Someone would already have dementia, so we can determine whether they would benefit from future treatments."
The study was published in the journal QMUL.
Interesting!
ReplyDelete