New Technique Helps With Early Alzheimer's Diagnosis
New Technique Helps With Early Alzheimer's Diagnosis
July 19, 2001 -- A startling breakthrough in visualizing the brain may help develop drugs that can halt the progress of Alzheimer's disease -- and might someday be used to identify and treat individuals who will get the disease, even before symptoms appear.
The new technology is called "voxel-compression imaging," a twist on magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, in which successive pictures of the brain can be superimposed to provide a very detailed picture of how the brain has changed over time.
In a study published in The Lancet, Nick Fox, MD, clinical scientist at the National Hospital for Neurology, in London, and colleagues used the technology to show significant decreases in brain volume over a five to eight year period in four patients with a family history of Alzheimer's. Those four individuals did not yet have symptoms when their brains were scanned but did eventually go on to develop Alzheimer's, according to the study.
"We know that in Alzheimer's the brain loses volume," he tells WebMD. But, he explains, "if you take a single snapshot, as with a typical brain scan, it is extremely difficult to say whether the brain has lost volume. What you need to do is compare it with previous scans."
That's important because Alzheimer's disease -- a progressive brain disease resulting in dementia and estimated to afflict 4.5 million Americans -- is now widely believed to begin with changes in brain volume and chemistry long before symptoms actually appear.
In the Lancet study, Fox and colleagues also used the imaging technology to look at the brains of people who already had symptoms of Alzheimer's. They found far more extensive brain damage than has been previously suspected, he says.
"The amount of [brain changes] in people with symptoms is considerable, and not confined to one part of the brain," Fox tells WebMD. "By the time they have been diagnosed, the disease tends to be quite widespread."
So could the technology be employed now to identify and treat patients before they have symptoms?
Probably not until better drugs are developed to treat the disease, says Fox. But in the meantime, voxel-compression imaging could be very promising in research designed to test those new drugs.
New Technique Helps With Early Alzheimer's Diagnosis
July 19, 2001 -- A startling breakthrough in visualizing the brain may help develop drugs that can halt the progress of Alzheimer's disease -- and might someday be used to identify and treat individuals who will get the disease, even before symptoms appear.
The new technology is called "voxel-compression imaging," a twist on magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, in which successive pictures of the brain can be superimposed to provide a very detailed picture of how the brain has changed over time.
In a study published in The Lancet, Nick Fox, MD, clinical scientist at the National Hospital for Neurology, in London, and colleagues used the technology to show significant decreases in brain volume over a five to eight year period in four patients with a family history of Alzheimer's. Those four individuals did not yet have symptoms when their brains were scanned but did eventually go on to develop Alzheimer's, according to the study.
"We know that in Alzheimer's the brain loses volume," he tells WebMD. But, he explains, "if you take a single snapshot, as with a typical brain scan, it is extremely difficult to say whether the brain has lost volume. What you need to do is compare it with previous scans."
That's important because Alzheimer's disease -- a progressive brain disease resulting in dementia and estimated to afflict 4.5 million Americans -- is now widely believed to begin with changes in brain volume and chemistry long before symptoms actually appear.
In the Lancet study, Fox and colleagues also used the imaging technology to look at the brains of people who already had symptoms of Alzheimer's. They found far more extensive brain damage than has been previously suspected, he says.
"The amount of [brain changes] in people with symptoms is considerable, and not confined to one part of the brain," Fox tells WebMD. "By the time they have been diagnosed, the disease tends to be quite widespread."
So could the technology be employed now to identify and treat patients before they have symptoms?
Probably not until better drugs are developed to treat the disease, says Fox. But in the meantime, voxel-compression imaging could be very promising in research designed to test those new drugs.