Alzheimer's Disease May Be Found Earlier with MRI

 MRI with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has shown promise for predicting dementia risk, researchers report.

About half the people in the study who had abnormalities in fractional anisotropy -- one of the metrics of white matter integrity in the brain -- went on to develop Alzheimer's dementia, and the scans were 89% accurate in predicting this outcome, reported Cyrus A. Raji, MD, PhD, of the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues.

A higher fractional anisotropy score indicated a more orderly fashion along the frontal white matter tracts of the brain, while a lower value meant that the tracts were likely damaged; people who developed Alzheimer's dementia had lower scores, Raji said at the Radiological Society of North America annual meeting.

"We are using MRI to look for the earliest possible signs of Alzheimer's disease because the biggest question we face in research is not only who is more likely to develop the disorder, but who is likely to develop it at a stage where it can be attacked very early on before the symptoms are too severe," Raji told MedPage Today."Right now, patients have to have really significant memory decline before they get scanned, and waiting that long is like waiting for stage IV metastatic breast cancer at which point there is very little we can do to help."

Learn more: Alzheimer's Disease May Be Found Earlier with MRI