Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have used specialized scans to identify brain changes in older people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
Special MRI and PET scans were used among study participants in their 70s and 80s to find changes in the brain that are considered connected to the brain-wasting disease, WebMD.com reports. The tests looked for amyloid-beta plaques, which are thought to be an early link to Alzheimer’s, as well as biochemical changes.
Among the people studied, about one-third had high plaque levels, and those who were reported to have high levels on the PET scan also had biochemical changes evident on the MRI.
"We found that these biochemical changes in the brain of normally aging people were associated with worse performance on tests of mental abilities, including memory, language, and attention," Dr. Kejal Kantarci, associate professor of radiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., tells WebMD.com.
The work was published in Neurology and funded by the National Institutes of Health. To read the complete WebMD.com story, Go Here Now
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