Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease: possible role of functional imaging technique - Introduction

A Special Author Introduction
Middle East Current Psychiatry

ISSN: 2090-5416• Frequency: 4/year • Subscribe Now • Journal Website

By Mohamed Ezzat El-Hadidy

The diagnosis of definite Alzheimer's disease (AD) can only be made by postmortem neuropathological confirmation of individuals who had been studied in life and met the criteria for dementia. Clinical AD is still diagnosed by excluding other causes of dementia.

With important breakthrough in the treatment of AD, the diagnostic focus has increasingly shifted to the accurate detection of the earliest phase of the illness. Hence, diagnosing of Minimal Cognitive Impairment (MCI) has received significant attention. The amnesic type of MCI (a-MCI) is frequently found as a prodrome to AD, whereas the prognostic significance of other subtypes of MCI is not well understood. Brain imaging studies are not routinely used for the diagnosis of MCI, although imaging techniques are rapidly developing and may prove to be clinically useful in future.

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is a technique involves noninvasive functional imaging, that is, processing through high-speed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), with images acquired in a few seconds or less, thus providing motion-free images. This advent made DWI an everyday routine scan for nearly all neurology examinations today.

Combination of clinical diagnosis of AD with DWI was assumed to improve the diagnostic accuracy. So, this work was determined to the relationship between the measures of diffusivity of water molecules and clinically diagnosed AD and its prototype a-MCI. Changes in DWI in the right and left cerebral regions of AD were assessed. In addition, the relationship between the severity of cognitive and behavioral manifestations of AD as measured by neuropsychological assessments and the DWI was tested.

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