Senior memory computer memory referral link Senior memory computer memory referral link

Did you come here looking for computer memory?  Click below...
Get FREE SHIPPING on computer memory upgrades from 4allmemory.com




Brain

Memory Aging: Major Imaging Initiative to Shed Light on Little Known Brain Disease

by A Senior Master Mind on March 6, 2011



San Francisco, CA (Vocus) January 26, 2010

UCSF scientists have received a $ 10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to embark on a major neuroimaging study of a degenerative brain disease that is at least as common as Alzheimer’s disease in people under age 60.

The fatal disease, known as frontotemporal dementia, affects decision-making, behavior, emotion and language. It gradually destroys the ability to behave in a socially appropriate manner, to empathize with others, learn, reason, make judgments, communicate and carry out daily activities. Because of the changes in personality that occur, the disease is perplexing for loved ones before a diagnosis is made and remains a particularly distressing disorder to manage. Some patients, as a result of their disease, mishandle money, commit adultery and carry out criminal behaviors, such as embezzlement.

Scientists have identified several mutated genes associated with the various forms of the disease, each of which in its own way leads to destruction of nerve cells in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. However, there are no therapies targeting the proteins the gene’s produce, though a multi-institutional trial is under way to test a drug that targets some of the disease’s symptoms.

The current study, led by Howard Rosen, MD, UCSF associate professor of neurology, is intended to determine how to use new imaging techniques to illuminate the changes that occur in the brain as the disease progresses. This information will enable scientists to identify biomarkers for diagnosis and, most importantly, track the impact of experimental drugs.

“Having accurate measures of the normal rates of change in FTD will be critical for planning future medication trials that will use imaging as an outcome,” says Rosen.

“While cognitive testing scores vary from day to day due to factors such as sleep quality and medication use, imaging studies measure brain structure and function precisely. They can reveal when a drug has slowed or reversed the brain shrinkage that would normally occur.”

UCSF and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, will collaborate to enroll 120 FTD patients, as well as about 80 people who will serve as cognitively normal “controls.” Each participant will be followed for one and a half years with neurological examinations, cognitive and behavioral assessments, and brain imaging. Neurologist David Knopman, MD, will lead the Mayo team.

FTD is diagnosed by an assessment of a patient’s clinical history, and by neurological, cognitive and behavioral evaluations. Blood tests and neuroimaging supplement the process, but primarily help rule out other neurological disorders and provide additional evidence for FTD, rather than reveal a definitive diagnosis.

The new imaging project, which will begin in early 2010, will obtain several different types of images in each patient. Some will be obtained through structural magnetic resonance imaging, which measures the size and shape of the brain, and positron emission tomography, which examines aspects of metabolism, such as glucose consumption. Others will be obtained through promising new MRI techniques, including imaging to measure the blood content in the brain, and imaging to determine the integrity of the neural wiring, or axons, connecting various parts of the brain, using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging.

“It is possible that one or both of these techniques could replace PET scanning, which is expensive and requires exposure to radiation,” says Rosen. “This would lower the cost of clinical trials and make it possible for more patients to enroll because MRI scanners are commonly available.”

The study will investigate whether a combination of images, such as structural MRI, PET and DTI, will provide a better explanation of how a patient is doing than any one of these image types alone. It also will include serial assessments of the chemistry in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid the surrounds the brain, to see how these relate to changes in the brain images.

The new study, known as the Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration Neuroimaging Initiative, takes advantage of the infrastructure developed for another major NIH-funded study of which UCSF is a leader, known as the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, says Rosen.

The ADNI, begun in 2004, established procedures that make it possible to obtain comparable images at different centers, and has established procedures for ensuring high quality data. This year, the ADNI made a significant step forward in developing a test to help diagnose the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s disease sooner and more accurately by measuring levels of two biomarkers — tau and beta-amyloid proteins — in cerebrospinal fluid.

The FTLDNI is funded primarily by the National Institute of Aging, and is co-funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke.

Related links:

UCSF Memory and Aging Center – spotlight on FTD

http://memory.ucsf.edu/ftd/

UCSF Memory and Aging Center

http://memory.ucsf.edu/

Contact:

Corinna Kaarlela, News Director

Source: Jennifer O’Brien (415) 476-2557

Web: www.ucsf.edu

###





Related Memory Aging Press Releases

Related Posts:

Memory Aging: UCSF, Stanford Study Reveals Neural Networks Targeted in Brain Diseases

by Bob McCluskey on February 11, 2011



Ferndale, WA (Vocus) April 15, 2009

Scientists are reporting the strongest evidence to date that neurodegenerative diseases target and progress along distinct neural networks that normally support healthy brain function. The discovery could lead to earlier diagnoses, novel treatment-monitoring strategies, and, possibly, recognition of a common disease process among all forms of neurodegeneration.

The study, reported in the April 16 issue of the journal “Neuron,” was conducted by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco and the Stanford University School of Medicine, who characterized their finding as “an important new framework for understanding neurodegenerative disease.”

The finding inspired the image for the cover of the issue of the journal.

Researchers have known that neurodegenerative diseases are associated with misfolded proteins that aggregate within specific populations of neurons in the brain. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, results from misfolding events involving beta-amyloid and tau proteins, which result in neuritic plaque and neurofibrillary tangle formation in medial temporal memory structures. In all neurodegenerative diseases, synapses between nerve cells falter, and damage spreads to new regions, accompanied by worsening clinical deficits.

In most cases, however, scientists have not known what determines the specific brain regions affected by a disease. The current neuroimaging study, which examined patients with five forms of early age-of-onset dementia — Alzheimer’s disease, behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, semantic dementia, progressive nonfluent aphasia, and corticobasal syndrome – as well as two groups of healthy controls, showed that each disease targets a different neural network.

“The study suggests that these diseases don’t spread across the brain like a plaque but instead travel along established neural network pathways,” says the lead author of the study, William W. Seeley, MD, assistant professor of neurology at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

Earlier work performed by Michael Greicius, MD, senior author and assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford, provided Seeley with the inspiration for the present study, which extended Greicius’ work on Alzheimer’s disease to a host of additional dementias. The findings suggest that network degeneration represents a class-wide neurodegenerative disease phenomenon.

“Something about a network’s architecture or biology is either bringing the disease to networked regions or propagating disease between network nodes,” says Seeley.

At this point, the scientists have shown that the diseases cause atrophy in networked regions. “We still need to determine how the diseases impact connectivity, and we don’t yet know how, at the molecular level, disease spreads between networked areas,” says Seeley.

Greicius further commented, “These results suggest that brain imaging measures of network strength should be sensitive enough to detect these diseases at an early stage and, as importantly, specific enough to reliably distinguish one disease from the others.”

If all forms of neurodegenerative disease are propagated along synaptic connections, says Seeley, “the framework would have major mechanistic significance, predicting that the spatial patterning of disease relates to some structural, metabolic or physiological aspect of neural network biology.”

“We hope our finding will stimulate basic researchers to try to understand the molecular mechanisms for network-based neurodegeneration,” he says.

Meanwhile, Seeley, Greicius, and their colleagues plan to test neural network-based diagnostic and disease-monitoring studies in younger people with genetic predispositions to Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. The goal is to try to track incipient changes in neural network connectivity and, ultimately, to track how well new experimental drugs can repair or maintain connectivity once an individual begins to show signs of dysfunction.

“Our hope is to develop tools that can detect these diseases even before symptoms emerge, so that disease-modifying therapies can get started before it is too late,” Seeley concludes.

Co-authors of the study were Richard K. Crawford, BS, Juan Zhou, PhD and Bruce L. Miller, MD, (Director), all of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Aging, the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation.

Related links:

UCSF’s Seeley website:

http://neurology.ucsf.edu/seeley/index.html

UCSF Memory and Aging Center

http://memory.ucsf.edu

Stanford’s Greicius website:

http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Michael_Greicius/

Stanford Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences

http://neurology.stanford.edu/

Released jointly by University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University

Sources:

Jennifer O’Brien, UCSF

(415) 476-2557

Web: www.ucsf.edu

Bruce Goldman, Stanford School of Medicine

(650) 725-2106

Web: http://med.stanford.edu/

# # #





Related Memory Aging Press Releases

Related Posts:

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →

Copyright © 2010 Master Minds: Senior Memory Source - All rights reserved.

| Advertising/Reviews Disclosures | Contact Us | Privacy Policy |

No content on this site may be reused in any fashion without written permission from Master Minds: Senior Memory Source