Brain imaging researchers from The University of Queensland (UQ) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) have produced high-resolution maps of a dynamic wave of tissue loss in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease sufferers.
The findings, published in and featured on the cover of the February 1 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, chart how Alzheimer’s disease spreads dynamically in the brain compared to normal ageing,.
The information is crucial to understanding how the disease progresses and for mapping treatment effects.
The UQ and UCLA researchers found that the loss of grey matter associated with Alzheimer’s disease spread over time from the memory and language areas of the brain to frontal and more posterior regions.
Brain regions involved in sensory-motor functions were relatively spared, while it was also discovered that the wave of tissue loss was greater in the left than right side of the brain.
The novel brain mapping methods used in the study are likely to provide a powerful biological marker for clinical trials of novel treatments compared to conventional methods.
The UQ researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology to scan patients with Alzheimer’s disease and the normal elderly, with sub-millimetre spatial resolution.
Using supercomputers, the UCLA researchers created colour-coded maps that distinguished the degenerative sequence of Alzheimer’s disease via novel brain mapping methods.
The wave of grey matter loss was strongly related to the progressive decline in cognitive functioning that is a key feature of the disease.
“While new treatment and diagnostic methods for Alzheimer’s disease continue to be developed and tested with varying degrees of success, the use of sophisticated MRI scanning in conjunction with cognitive testing remains a ‘gold standard’ for quantitatively visualising patterns of brain tissue loss associated with the disease’s progression in living patients,” said Professor David Doddrell, Director of the Centre for Magnetic Resonance (CMR) at UQwhere the study was conducted,
Paul Thompson, an assistant professor of neurology at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, developed and applied the new brain mapping methods to the MRI data.
“The unique, high-quality, longitudinal imaging data from the CMR has spurred key developments in analytical methods to track disease progression,” he said.
“In our collaborative work so far, our joint papers have shown that it is possible to map the temporal dynamics of Alzheimer’s disease as deficits spread in the brain.
“This work holds enormous promise for detecting and understanding the genetic and interventional factors that modify the advance of the disease”.
The UQ researchers published results from their study in 2001, using their own novel brain mapping techniques that won the prestigious W. S. Moore Award at the annual scientific meeting of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Glasgow.
The present study represents the initial results of a collaboration on novel brain mapping methods with the UCLA researchers.
In the interest of developing sensitive psychobiological markers of Alzheimer’s disease, data generated from the CMR’s extensive Alzheimer’s disease study has been made freely available to a number of international research groups, including the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro-imaging and Brain Mapping, Montreal Neurological Institute, Max Planck Institute (Munich), and Paolo Vitali Clinical Neurophysiology Service (University of Genova, Italy).
Researchers at the CMR are currently using novel MRI scanning and brain mapping methods for the longitudinal study of a condition called mild cognitive impairment, thought to be a pre-clinical state of Alzheimer’s disease.
Graphics related to the study, including movies of the brain tissue loss over time, can be found at: http://www.loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/AD_4D/video.html
For further information, contact Greig de Zubicaray on 07 3365 4250 or at greig.dezubicaray@cmr.uq.edu.au
