Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia affect over five million Americans. Alzheimer's disease begins with changes in the brain more than a decade before the disease can be diagnosed from memory and cognitive impairment in a clinic. The goal of this work is to provide a way to measure early signs of neurodegeneration in individual people. The historical barrier to measure change in individuals is that each person's brain is different with change accumulating too slowly to be picked over short intervals. As a result, most research focuses on tracking averaged subject groups or tracking change over multiple years. The present work optimizes new brain imaging techniques using MRI to make extremely fast, highly precise repeated measurements of brain regions all within the same individual. The work then seeks to use the novel imaging approach to measure neurodegeneration in individuals with early stages of Alzheimer's disease in six months or less and also differentiate changes in people with Alzheimer's disease from less common forms of dementia that have distinct anatomical changes in the brain. If successful, the present work will provide a new means to track the early stages of neurodegeneration as would be used in clinical trials and translational medical research.
The proposed research explores the possibility of precisely estimating change in specific brain structures in individuals at early stages of neurodegeneration. Anchoring from recent developments in fast brain scanning techniques, we use a novel methodological approach that permits a tremendous increase in the precision of measuring change within a single person by repeatedly, safety, and efficiently scanning the brain over time. Demonstrating successful precision measurement within the individual will open opportunities to track therapeutic effects in small samples during early phases of development as well as allow for individualized estimates of neurodegeneration to be made dynamically within the same person. !
