Scientists suggest that a 10-minute brain scan could detect dementia several years before its noticeable onset. They achieved an estimated 80 per cent accuracy up to nine years before a person actually knew they suffer from dementia.
Fighting Dementia: What does it mean?
It simply means that if the findings are confirmed in a larger cohort, the scan could become a routine procedure in dementia treatment.
“We have known for a long time that the function of the brain starts to change many years before you get dementia symptoms,” professor Charles Marshall, who led the work at Queen Mary University of London, was quoted as saying by the Guardian.
“This could help us to be more precise at identifying those changes using an MRI scan that you could do on any NHS scanner.”
The study was published in Nature Mental Health.
“Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia,” Marshall said.
What did scientists do to predict dementia?
Scientists used functional MRI scans from 1,100 UK Biobank volunteers to detect changes in the brain’s “default mode network” (DMN).
The network reflects how effectively different regions are communicating with each other that are particularly vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease.
Of the volunteers, 81 went on to develop dementia after the UK Biobank scan.
The researchers then deployed Artificial Intelligence to identify changes to the DMN that were most characteristic of those at risk.
The resultant model could identify those at risk with 80 per cent accuracy up to nine years before diagnosis.
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Scientists said that a simple brain scan, that would take about 10 minutes, could be used alongside recently developed blood tests that target proteins in the brain that cause Alzheimer’s disease.
(With inputs from agencies)