Magnets can improve language ability in Alzheimer's patients

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ANI

Scientists have demonstrated that a brain stimulation technique, known as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, boosts the language ability of patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS for short, is a non-invasive technique that involves the delivery of a rapid succession of magnetic pulses in frequencies of up to 100 Hz.

Previous research has shown that this can alter neuronal activity, depending on the frequency of the stimulation.

The technique, which was applied to the prefrontal lobes for 25 minutes each time at a frequency of 20 Hz, was tested in 10 patients with moderate Alzheimer's disease.

Half were randomly assigned to receive four weeks of rTMS (five days a week), and half were given a dummy treatment for two weeks, followed by two weeks of rTMS.

Each participant was tested for memory, executive functions, such as planning, and language at the start of the study, then after two and four weeks, and again after eight weeks.

Significant differences emerged between the two groups after two weeks in respect of the ability of participants to understand spoken language.

The percentage of correct answers after a comprehension test rose from 66percent to over 77 percent among those given rTMS, whereas there was no change in those given the dummy technique.

There was no further change after four weeks, but the improvements were still evident at eight weeks.

rTMS did not alter other language abilities or other cognitive functions, including memory, which suggests that the technique is specific to the language domain of the brain, when applied to the prefrontal lobes, say the authors.

It is not completely clear how the technique works. Rhythmic stimulation may alter cortical activity in the brain, so readjusting unhealthy patterns induced by disease or damage, suggest the authors.

There is some evidence to back this up as imaging studies of people with congenital or acquired brain damage have shown that certain areas of the brain seem to be plastic and that cortical activity can be "reorganised" as a result.

"The present preliminary results ... hold considerable promise, not only for advancing our understanding of brain plasticity mechanisms, but also for designing new rehabilitation strategies in patients with neurodegenerative disease," the authors conclude.

The study has been published online in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. (ANI)

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Progress being made in early detection of Alzheimer’s disease

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Nashua Telegraph

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s can start assaulting brain cells many years before any outward signs of the damage are displayed.

That makes it difficult for doctors trying to come up with early diagnosis and possible interventions for millions of Americans.

Until recently, assorted memory and mental-processing tests were about the only tools doctors had to determine the onset of dementia, and it’s often hard to distinguish whether the problem is caused by the tangles and plaque buildup of Alzheimer’s, a stroke or some other medical condition, or even an adverse drug reaction.

Scientists have worked with some general measurements of brain-volume loss as a marker for disease, but without much precision. Over the last several years, though, researchers have begun to make strides using various brain-imaging tools to look at structures inside the skull.

Working through data compiled by numerous participants in the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, scientists have made enough comparisons between images from scans and autopsies to start to understand what changes in the size or even energy consumption of different parts of the brain might mean.

One team at the University of California, San Diego, recently reported a fairly quick way to identify Alzheimer’s progression using magnetic resonance imaging.

The researchers found that changes in the brain’s memory regions, particularly a part of the temporal lobe called the entorhinal cortex, offer sensitive measures of early stages of the disease.

“The technique is extremely powerful, because it allows a researcher to examine exactly how much brain-volume loss has occurred in each region of the brain, including the cortical regions, where we know the bad proteins of Alzheimer’s disease build up,” said Dr. James Brewer, a neurologist and co-author of a study reporting the findings last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The scientists say the imaging markers not only track brain atrophy, “but distinguish the early states of Alzheimer’s disease from changes related to normal aging,’’ said Anders Dale, the professor of neuroscience and radiology who led the project.

Another group, at Washington University in St. Louis, moved detection ahead still further in mid-December with studies that show people with measurable levels of a protein associated with Alzheimer’s are at greater risk of developing the disease and for losing brain volume later on.

One project, done from 2004-08, tracked 159 volunteers ages 51-88 with no sign of cognitive impairment using scans that can detect the protein beta-amyloid in the brain, as well as MRIs to measure brain volume and standard memory and thinking tests.

Over time, 23 of the subjects developed mild cognitive impairment and nine were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. All had relatively high levels of the protein compared with subjects who remained cognitively normal, but so, too, did some who didn’t become impaired.

Another study, of 135 volunteers ages 65-88, found that levels of the protein matched atrophy of brain regions associated with memory, and declining scores in thinking and memory tests over many years. The findings were published in the Archives of Neurology.

“These studies confirm the value of detecting and measuring amyloid load in the brains of living people as soon as possible,’’ said Dr. John Morris, who led one of the studies and heads the university’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

Meanwhile, neurologists at Penn State’s Hershey College of Medicine compared videos of walking movements of a small group of volunteers to those of a group diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and found that the extent to which one arm swings versus the other while walking could represent a very early sign of the disease. The asymmetry in arm movement was much more noticeable in the subjects with Parkinson’s.

“Our data suggests this could be a very useful tool for early detection,’’ said Xuemei Huang, lead author of the report published in the journal Gait and Posture.

Such early diagnosis could be useful if widespread efforts to find drugs that can halt the death of dopamine-producing brain cells early in the course of Parkinson’s start to pay off, she said

Neurodegenerative diseases target healthy brain's intrinsic networks

EurekAlert
Contact: Cathleen Genova
cgenova@cell.com
617-397-2802
Cell Press

New research suggests that neurodegenerative diseases are neither diffuse nor random but specifically target large-scale functional networks in the human brain. The study, published by Cell Press in the April 16 issue of the journal Neuron, may drive a new generation of network-based strategies for diagnosing and monitoring neurodegenerative diseases.

Brain imaging studies have revealed the architecture of intrinsic functional networks in the human brain. These networks involve multiple functionally related groups of neurons that exhibit spontaneous synchronous baseline activity during task-free conditions. Previous work has established that connectivity within these networks can influence task performance, but it has remained unclear how fluctuations in neural network activity are correlated with brain structure in health and disease.

"Although some studies suggested that Alzheimer's disease may attack a specific large-scale network, we hypothesized that all neurodegenerative diseases target a distinct signature network," says lead study author Dr. William W. Seeley from the University of California, San Francisco. "If demonstrated as a class-wide phenomenon, this network degeneration framework could have major mechanistic significance, predicting that spatial patterning of disease relates to some structural, metabolic, or physiological aspect of neural network biology."

To examine whether large-scale neural networks are targeted by disease in living humans, Dr. Seeley and colleagues used neuroimaging to study patients with five distinct neurodegenerative syndromes and two healthy control groups. The researchers found that each of the neurodegenerative syndromes featured a distinct regional vulnerability pattern within one of five specific healthy human intrinsic networks.

Additionally, the authors found a direct link between intrinsic connectivity and normal brain structure. In the healthy individuals, nodes within each functional network exhibited tightly correlated gray matter tissue volumes. "These results provide a new, structure-based window into network organization," says Dr. Seeley. "It appears that regions that fire together also grow (in health) or atrophy (in disease) together."

These results provide strong support for the........read the whole article

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