Familial risk for Alzheimer's disease alters fMRI activation patterns.

Alzheimer's disease poses a looming crisis for the health care system as well as society in general. The low efficacy of current treatments for those already affected with this disease has prompted the suggestion that interventions might be more successful if they were applied before the development of significant pathology, that is, when individuals are clinically asymptomatic. Currently, the field requires a sensitive and specific diagnostic tool for identifying those individuals destined to develop this disease. As a first step, we present here an analysis of cross-sectional data for 95 asymptomatic offspring (50-75 years of age) of autopsy-confirmed late-onset familial Alzheimer's disease cases and 90 age-matched controls, studied with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain activation patterns. Analysis of activation in response to a paired-associates memory paradigm found significantly different patterns in these groups. At-risk individuals showed more intense and extensive activation in the frontal and temporal lobes including the hippocampus during memory encoding, an increase unrelated to the APOE epsilon4 allele. They also showed decreased activation particularly in the cingulum and thalamus during both the encoding and recall phases of the task. These results demonstrate that asymptomatic individuals, at genetic risk for development of late-onset Alzheimer's disease by virtue of familial clustering, show functional activation patterns distinct from those without such risk more than a decade before their parent's onset age. While longitudinal study is needed to determine whether these patterns, or a subset of them, are predictive of disease onset, these findings suggest that functional neuroimaging holds promise as a method of identifying pre-clinical Alzheimer's disease.

Altered fMRI activation during mental rotation in those at genetic risk for Alzheimer disease.

OBJECTIVE: This study was undertaken to examine differential functional MRI patterns in those at genetic risk for Alzheimer disease (AD), specifically investigating parietal lobe activation, a brain region with changes noted in the early stages of AD. METHODS: This study uses functional MRI to investigate blood oxygenation level dependent changes in the parietal lobe in a high-risk sample of 18 asymptomatic offspring of autopsy-confirmed AD cases, compared to 15 matched controls. The cognitive activation paradigm was a mental rotation task, which requires individuals to rotate three-dimensional cube stimuli to judge their similarity. RESULTS: We found no differences in either reaction time or performance accuracy between groups. However, the at-risk individuals showed increases in activation in the right superior parietal lobule (BA 7), the right insula (BA 13), the right middle frontal gyrus (BA 10), and the right inferior frontal gyrus (BA 47). CONCLUSIONS: We present evidence for a compensatory mechanism for those at increased risk for Alzheimer disease (AD). This study examines and confirms parietal changes with increased risk for late-onset AD, despite normal cognitive performance. Added to the previous findings from this group, these results demonstrate the sensitivity of functional imaging measures to brain changes that are not yet reflected in cognitive performance, which may ultimately serve as an important indicator of disease.

Brain activation in offspring of AD cases corresponds to 10q linkage.

Previously, we reported evidence of genetic heterogeneity in late-onset familial Alzheimer's disease, based on sex of affected parent, demonstrating linkage to chromosome 10q, a region identified by other groups and implicated as a quantitative trait loci for Abeta levels, in families with an affected mother. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a memory encoding task, we now show differential brain activation patterns among asymptomatic offspring which correspond to the previous linkage finding. These results suggest the possibility that activation patterns may prove useful as a preclinical quantitative trait related to the putative familial late-onset AD gene in this chromosome 10 region.