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Healthy children of Alzheimer patients show
early Brain changes
Newswise — Medical College of
Wisconsin researchers in Milwaukee have
reported that children of Alzheimer's
patients who are carriers of a genetic risk
factor for Alzheimer’s disease have
neurological changes that are detectable
long before clinical symptoms may appear.
Functional MRI brain imaging
revealed that these symptomless carriers of
the APOE-4 gene demonstrated significantly
reduced functional brain connectivity
between the hippocampus and the posterior
cingulated cortex, two important brain
structures for memory processing.
These structures are relevant
for information acquisition, filtering and
sorting.
The study, conducted at
Froedtert Hospital, was led by Shi Jiang Li,
Ph.D., professor of biophysics, and was
presented at the Alzheimer's Association
International Conference on Alzheimer's
disease in Chicago, July 29th
“Just as if cancer could be
detected when there were only a few cells,
decades before it was evident, the advantage
of identifying those at great risk for
having Alzheimer’s would be of tremendous
value in development of interventional
therapies,” says Dr. Li.
The researchers studied 28
neurologically-normal subjects, between ages
45 and 65. Twelve carried the APOE-4 gene
and 16 did not. The two groups showed no
significant difference in age, educational
level, or neuropsychological performances.
All subjects received fMRI scans. For each
subject, functional connectivity between the
two brain structures was measured in a
resting state.
Results showed that functional connectivity
in the non APOE-4 carriers was approximately
65 percent better than that of the carriers.
Other members of the research
team were Piero Antuono, M.D., professor of
neurology, and Zhilin Wu, Ph.D., Chunming
Xie, Ph.D., and Jennifer L. Jones, M.S.,
research associates in the departments of
biophysics and neurology.
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