The study, to be published Feb. 8 in the journal Annals of Neurology, provides encouraging evidence that positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could eventually be used to detect preclinical signs of Alzheimer's disease.
"Our paper is one of the few to show that it is possible to detect changes in the brains of normal older people who experience subsequent cognitive decline," said Dr. William Jagust, UC Berkeley professor of neuroscience and public health and lead author of the paper. "We don't have enough data, yet, to say that the brain scans can predict Alzheimer's disease. However, the locations of the affected brain regions have been associated in other studies with Alzheimer's, so it's possible that we are picking up early signs of the disease."
Jagust, who has joint appointments at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, worked with Mary Haan, professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan and principal investigator of the Sacramento Area Latino Study on Aging (SALSA).
The brain imaging study is a substudy of SALSA, the first and only representative study of dementia and cognitive functioning in a Latino population. SALSA, funded by the National Institute on Aging, includes 1,789 people, primarily Mexican American, who were recruited by mail, telephone and door-to-door solicitation.
For the imaging substudy, 60 cognitively normal participants received baseline PET and MRI brain scans and underwent a full battery of neuropsychological tests at enrollment. They were followed for an average of 3.8 years, taking cognition and memory tests approx
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Contact: Sarah Yang
scyang@berkeley.edu
510-643-7741
University of California - Berkeley
8-Feb-2006