(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- A new study shows despite otherwise healthy brain function, children of Alzheimer's patients who carry a genetic risk factor show significantly reduced functional brain connectivity.
Many offspring of Alzheimer's patients carry the APOE-4 gene. Carrying this gene makes patients between three and 15 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than non-carriers. In a recent study, functional MRI scans of symptomless carriers of the APOE-4 gene showed reduced functional brain connectivity between the hippocampus and the posterior cingulated cortex -- two important brain structures for memory processing, information acquisition, filtering and sorting.
Study participants were between the ages of 45 and 65 and neurologically normal. Results showed non-APOE-4 carriers had functional connectivity 65 percent better than that of the carriers.
"Just as if cancer could be detected when there were only a few cells, decades before it was evident, the advantage of identifying those at great risk for having Alzheimer's would be of tremendous value in development of interventional therapies," Shi Jiang Li, Ph.D., professor of biophysics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was quoted as saying.
SOURCE: Presented at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference on Alzheimer's disease in Chicago, July 29, 2008
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