An interesting new health science study may go a long way towards helping to find out who is most at risk for Alzheimer?s disease; an important step that will help doctor?s identify and possibly treat the disease in its earliest stages. The study examined people without memory loss (one of Alzheimer?s earliest recognizable symptoms) and managed to draw a correlation between the size of a patient?s brain cortex and their likelihood for developing early-onset dementia and eventually Alzheimer?s. This research comes on the shoulders of other scientific research that has already helped pinpoint the regions of the brain that deteriorate from the disease.
The study itself was conducted by running a brain scan on some 159 people with an average age of 76, all free of any sign of dementia. The patients were observed over the next three years and periodically administered tests in order to measure their basic attention span, overall memory, and ability to recognize and solve a particular problem.
These tests (both the MRI and the cognitive ability tests) were able to identify 19 patients as being at a high-risk for developing Alzheimer?s. 116 patients were identified as being at an average risk, and 24 were classified as being at a fairly low risk. These classifications were all based on the size of the brain cortexes known to be at the most risk in the event of the development of the disease. Smaller cortexes in the brain were taken as a sign having a greater than average susceptibility to the disease itself.
Over the next three years, 21% of the high-risk patients experienced some level of measureable cognitive decline, compared to only 7% of the average risk patients and none of the low-risk patients.
The research also made some interesting findings in another disease marker already identified by science: of the group considered to be at the highest risk of Alzheimer?s, 60% of them had abnormal levels of proteins in their cerebrospinal fluid. Only 35% of the average-risk patients had a similar abnormality in their protein levels, and only 19% of the low-risk patients had the same problem.
Due to the studies fairly small sample size, its findings can only be called inconclusive as of yet and further research is needed to solidify the science behind them. However, the implications of the research are profound and potentially open up the road to better treatment of Alzheimer?s patients thanks to early identification of the disease. While there is no cure as of yet, this research could prove invaluable in helping to discover one.
While the information may not be terribly useful to the layman in terms of identifying the disease (not many of us go in for brain scans on a regular basis), it?s still a very interesting discovery, with some potentially far-reaching effects in terms of disease treatment and identification. Doctors now have one more thing to look for in their patients, increasing the chance that the disease can be anticipated and studied in its onset stages.
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