Study suggests new potential biomarker
Sunday 15 May 2011
A study investigated brain activation in people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as they completed a memory task which assessed their visual perception of the spatial relationships of objects. It was found that when asked to remember the location of low numbers of patterns, the hippocampus area of the brains of people with MCI showed significantly more activation than the control participants. At higher levels of difficulty, people with MCI showed significantly lower levels of activation. The hippocampus is known to be affected early in Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers concluded that these findings suggest that people with MCI try to compensate by increasing brain activity but when the task becomes too difficult, the brain activity reduces and that this measure may be useful as a biomarker for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
The research was carried out by Barbara Sahakian, University of Cambridge, UK and colleagues and published in the journal Neuropsychologia.
For further information please see the article entitled “Test could detect Alzheimer’s disease earlier” on the University of Cambridge website at: