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A new 3-D time-lapse video technique is helping neuroscientists see the progression
of Alzheimer’s disease in patients’ brains for the first time.
As this ScienCentral News video reports, it will help in early diagnosis and
intervention.
Brain Map
Until now, doctors could only measure the physical spread of Alzheimer’s
disease by examining the brains of deceased patients after it was too late
to help them. But with a new brain scanning technique, now they can see the
disease progressing in living patients, which will allow them to pinpoint
where and how fast the disease is spreading, and reveal whether drugs and
vaccines combat the brain damage that Alzheimer’s causes.
Neuroscientists from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and the
University of Queensland in Australia used a new imaging analysis technique
to track the spread of Alzheimer’s-related cell death in living patients.
They detected changes in brain scans created using magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI), and created the first 3-D,
time-lapse
video map showing the spread of Alzheimer’s disease.
“This is the first technique to actually watch the physical spread of
Alzheimer’s in the [living] brain,” says Paul
Thompson, assistant professor of neurology at the David
Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the study’s chief investigator.
“You can use this to look at drug effects, whether they are helping
a patient. You can use it for early diagnosis, to see if a person actually
has Alzheimer’s. You can also use it to tell if a patient is aging healthily.”
Researchers scanned twelve Alzheimer’s patients and fourteen healthy
elderly volunteers every three months for two years. They found that the Alzheimer’s
patients lost an average of 5.3 percent of their gray matter per year, whereas
the healthy volunteers lost only 0.9 percent of their brain tissue annually.
The time-lapse videos revealed that the destruction of brain cells in patients
with Alzheimer’s follows a specific sequence: the areas affected first
are those that control memory function; then, those that control emotion and
inhibition; and finally, those that control sensation. “You see this
forest fire of tissue loss in the brain,” says Thompson. “It’s
almost as though early changes happen in a very small area of the brain, but
then there is this sort of terrific spreading of cell loss into other areas.
With imaging, we can actually track the progression of this. Now, we all know
that if you can see something spreading, there might actually be a way of
stepping in and telling if the ways of preventing it are being helpful.”
These scans will allow doctors to evaluate whether a medication is actually
working in a patient, which, until now, they could only do by assessing whether
the patient’s memory was improving. “Just seeing if the memory
loss has slowed down isn’t the most effective way to see if the drug
is working,” explains Thompson. “But with brain scans you can
actually see if the physical spread of the disease is being slowed by the
medication, and which medications are best. Right now, there are a number
of medications for Alzheimer’s. We are very excited to apply scanning
to see whether one medication is better at saving one area, but another drug
might be more effective in different ways.”
The study, which appeared in the February 1st edition of the Journal
of Neuroscience, was supported by the National
Library of Medicine, the National
Center of Research Resources, a Human Brain Project Grant from the National
Institutes of Health, and by
GlaxoSmithKline
Pharmaceuticals.