The multidisciplinary team of scientists from the University of Coimbra (UC) and the Centro Hospitalar e Universitário de Coimbra focused on a part of the brain, the cingulate, which studies post-mortem alterations already indicated with Alzheimer’s disease. However, it was not known whether this brain region was affected early in the disease.
According to Miguel Castelo-Branco, from the Faculty of Medicine and one of the study coordinators, the researchers discovered a triple hot spot in this region that accumulates amyloid, becomes inflamed and where there is hyperactivity. “What’s very curious is that these people did a cognitive MRI memory task and we saw that, at these very early stages, this area of the brain that’s turning on has an overactivation that we think is compensatory activation,” he explains. . the investigator.
This discovery in the human brain has been shown live, with the participation of 40 people. Of these, 20 were diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s, and the rest were healthy people with the same sociodemographic characteristics. “We are talking about people in early stages who were able to do these three imaging tests. live. That’s what makes the studio so different. It was demanding from a technical point of view, it was demanding for the participants and we were able to document a critical region in Alzheimer’s disease”, adds Miguel Castelo-Branco.
The study also involved a suite of advanced functional and brain imaging techniques: dual PET (measuring neuroinflammation and amyloid deposition in the same patient) and functional MRI to measure brain activity in memory tasks.
For Miguel Castelo-Branco, the study, published in the journal Communications Biology, can open doors “to test the effects of new treatments” for the disease and help “consolidate early diagnosis.” “The diagnosis of dementia is not trivial. There are several subtypes of dementia and these kinds of image-based tools also help us make a better diagnosis,” he concludes.
The research also included the participation of Nádia Canário and Lília Jorge, first authors of the study, and Ricardo Martins, researchers at the Center for Biomedical Imaging and Translational Research of the UC Institute of Nuclear Sciences Applied to Health.
Source: TSF
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
