Because preventive therapies for Alzheimers will likely be more effective the earlier they are begun, the ability to identify people at high risk of the disease many years before symptoms are expressed will be important for its eventual prevention, the researchers say.

Karen Gosche, PhD, and her colleagues found that shrinkage of the hippocampus, a region of the brain showing some of the first signs of Alzheimers disease, occurs very early in the disease process long before the illness spreads to the cerebral cortex and results in cognitive and memory impairment. Dr. Gosche, president of NeuroImaging Research, Inc. in Alachua, FL, conducted the study while she was a doctoral candidate in Aging Studies at USF.

"The findings suggest that MRI measures of the hippocampus may help us to identify individuals who will develop Alzheimers disease decades in the future," said James Mortimer, PhD, director of the USF Institute on Aging and one of the co-authors of the study.

Postmortem MRI brain scans of 56 participants of the Nun Study were analyzed. Smaller volumes of the hippocampus seen on the scans could correctly identify older Catholic sisters who were cognitively normal before they died but fulfilled pathological criteria for fully developed Alzheimers disease at autopsy. In addition, the smaller hippocampal volumes were an indicator of milder pathological changes the accumulation of senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles believed to occur decades before the appearance of symptoms such as memory loss.

The volume of the hippocampus was measured with a new computer program that reduces the time required to compute this volume from more than a half
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Contact: Anne DeLotto Baier
abaier@hsc.usf.edu
813-974-3300
University of South Florida Health
27-May-2002