ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Study: Brain Scans Help Predict Alzheimer’s Disease Early

Shrinkage in certain parts of the brain may herald Alzheimer's disease long before symptoms arise, according to new research.

By ALICE PARK | @aliceparkny | December 22, 2011 | 

MEDICAL BODY SCANS / GETTY IMAGES

Alzheimer’s disease has always been difficult to diagnose — the only way to identify it definitively is by autopsying the brain after death — but scientists may now have an easier way to spot the degenerative brain disease long before that, even before symptoms appear, using brain scans.

People who go on to develop symptoms of memory loss and cognitive deficits are more likely to show shrinkage in certain areas of the brain early on, compared with those who don’t develop Alzheimer’s, and such changes can be seen in MRI scans of the brain, report Dr. Bradford Dickerson at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues in the journal Neurology. The team worked with hundreds of brain scans of patients at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, collected by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database./../