Communications of the ACM
Measuring Metabolism Can Predict the Progress of Alzheimer's with 90 Percent Accuracy
Credit: AFTAU
Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for identifying early signs of Alzheimer's disease in the brain's metabolism.
They developed predictive models that use metabolic information to monitor the progression of Alzheimer's, and the research is the first step toward identifying biomarkers that could lead to better detection and analysis of the disease at an early stage. "We hope that by studying metabolism, and the alterations to metabolism that occur in the very early stages of the disease, we can find new therapeutic strategies," says Tel Aviv University researcher Shiri Stempler.
The researchers used data collected from the brain's hippocampus region, and were able to build a predictive model that relates abnormalities in metabolic genes to the progression of Alzheimer's disease. "The correlation between metabolic gene expression and cognitive score in Alzheimer's patients is even higher than the correlation we see in medical literature between beta amyloid plaques--found in deposits in the brains of Alzheimer's patient-- and cognitive score, pointing to a strong association between cognitive decline and an altered metabolism," Stempler says.
In the future, the researchers want to identify biomarkers in the blood that are associated with these metabolic changes, which could lead to an easy, non-invasive blood test for the disease.
From American Friends of Tel Aviv University
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