Magnetic resonance imaging of Alzheimer’s disease

Abstract

A modern challenge for neuroimaging techniques is to contribute to the early diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Early diagnosis includes recognition of pre-demented conditions, such as mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or having a high risk of developing AD. The role of neuroimaging therefore extends beyond its traditional role of excluding other conditions such as neurosurgical lesions. In addition, early diagnosis would allow early treatment using currently available therapies or new therapies in the future. Structural imaging can detect and follow the time course of subtle brain atrophy as a surrogate marker for pathological processes. New MR techniques and image analysis software can detect subtle brain microstructural, perfusion or metabolic changes that provide new tools to study the pathological processes and detect pre-demented conditions. This review focuses on markers of macro- and microstructural, perfusion, diffusion and metabolic MR imaging and spectroscopy in AD.

Volume changes in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment: cognitive associations

“…We showed that in both MCI and AD groups, brain and ventricular changes were associated with change over 12 months in both the MMSE and ADAS-cog measures although this was borderline in brain rates with ADAS-cog in AD, and these results are consistent with previous reports [10,12,15,[39][40][41]. The associations may be explained by the nature of the neuropsychological tests: both MMSE and ADAS-cog are tests of global functioning, spanning many domains localised to multiple cerebral regions in different lobes and sub-cortical structures, giving a strong association with global atrophy measures.…”

La neuro-imagerie au service de la maladie d’Alzheimer

“…En raison de ces observations, la région hippocampique -et tout particulièrement l'hippocampe -a été principalement étudiée. Les premières études en IRM anatomique ont montré une diminution de la taille, ou atrophie, de cette structure [2][3][4][5]. Par la suite, les études plus exploratoires réalisées sur l'ensemble du cerveau avec des techniques automatiques ont montré que l'atrophie prédominait dans la région hippocampique, mais qu'elle s'étendait également à d'autres structures cérébrales.…”

Nanomedicine in the diagnosis and therapy of neurodegenerative disorders

“…CT, MRI, and DTI easily depict brain atrophy. Computerized tomography of the brain characteristically can show mass lesions or cerebral atrophy and is reflective of moderate to severe disease [70,78,79]. Indeed, MRI studies of patients can show changes in ventricular size, sulcal widening, diffuse white matter abnormalities and atrophy.…”