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By studying a rare form of dementia, scientists may have found a way to detect neurodegeneration before the loss of brain cells, a breakthrough that could give therapeutic treatments a chance to heal.
According to the study published in the journal Neuropsychologia, patients with a rare brain neurodegenerative disorder called primary progressive aphasia (PPA) present abnormalities of brain function in structurally normal areas on MRI.
"We wanted to study the impact of degeneration on brain function," said Aneta Kielar, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Arizona in the United States .
The team found that the brain had functional defects in areas that did not yet show structural damage on MRI scans.
The structural MRI provides a 3D visualization of the brain structure, which is useful when studying patients with diseases that literally cause brain dieback, such as PPA.
Magnetoencephalography, or MEG, on the other hand, "gives you a very good spatial accuracy as to the origin of the brain response," said Jed Meltzer, lead author of the study and assistant professor at the University of Toronto in Canada.
"We want to know if the decrease in brain function is coming from already atrophied regions or regions that are declining early," said Meltzer.
Kielar and his colleagues compared brain scans from PPA patients to healthy controls while both groups were performing language tasks.
The researchers also imaged the brains of the rest participants.
Functional defects were related to poorer performance in tasks because people with APP lose their ability to speak or understand the language while other aspects of cognition are usually preserved.
Identifying the discrepancy between the structural and functional integrity of the brain of a PPA could be used as an early detection method.
This is promising because "many drugs designed to treat dementia do not really look emotional and it's perhaps because we detect brain damage too late," Kielar said.
"Often, people do not come for help until their neurons are already dead.We can use compensation treatments to delay the course of the disease, but once the brain cells are dead, we can not recover them, "she said.
This technique could allow patients to get ahead of the damage, researchers said.
(This story has not been changed by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
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