14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory recently managed an important breakthrough, when they were able to gain important new information on a portion of the brain known as the perforant path. The team, which is based at the University of California in Irvine (UCI), says that this cortical region deteriorates constantly as people age, and argues that this phenomenon may play an important role in the development of Alzheimer's.
The path is linked with the hippocampus, a brain area that plays an important part in storing and retrieving memories. Experts have known this for years, but thus far they've been unable to discover its exact location. This all changed recently, when the UCI group used a new, ultrahigh-resolution observations technique to conduct its investigation. The work was conducted on a group of volunteers aged 18 to 89, which were subjected to Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The new study reveals that the perforant path deteriorates a lot faster in Alzheimer's than it does due to old age alone.
“The nice thing about this is we may be able to predict Alzheimer’s very early. Let’s say you’re a drug company, and you think you’ve got a potentially effective treatment for slowing Alzheimer’s. You want to try it on people in the most preliminary stages of that disease, not those just experiencing normal aging,” says Craig Stark, the interim director at the UCI Center. Details of the new observations technique, which Stark helped design and test, appear in the June 28 issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Funds for the new investigation came from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute on Aging. The UCI team is currently perfecting its technique, by analyzing individuals who only display signs of mild cognitive impairment. Oftentimes, that is the first sign of Alzheimer's, doctors say, and so using the new analysis tool could potentially save a lot of money in healthcare system costs. Treating a disease when it develops, rather than when it reaches it's full-blown state, is a lot cheaper.