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CHICAGO, April 5 (Xinhua) – Reducing blood capillaries at the back of the eye could be a new, non-invasive way to diagnose early cognitive impairment, precursor to Alzheimer's disease, revealed a study released Friday by Northwestern University (NU).
UN researchers recruited 32 participants whose cognitive tests corresponded to the type of cognitive impairment missed, and matched them to age, bad and race to subjects tested as cognitively normal for their age. All individuals underwent ocular imaging with OCT angiography.
They then detected the vascular changes in the human eye in a non-invasive way, with an infrared camera and without the need for dyes or expensive MRI scans.
It is known that patients with Alzheimer's disease have a decrease in retinal blood flow and vascular density.
"Once our findings are validated, this approach could potentially provide an additional type of biomarker to identify people at high risk of becoming Alzheimer's disease," said Amani Fawzi, a professor of research. Ophthalmology at the Feinberg NU School of Medicine.
Therapies for Alzheimer's disease are more effective if they are started before significant brain damage and cognitive decline have occurred, Fawzi added.
The researchers now hope to be able to correlate these findings with other types of more conventional, but also more invasive, Alzheimer's biomarkers, and to explore longitudinal changes in ocular parameters in these subjects.
The study was published Tuesday in PLOS ONE.
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