Scientists have developed a new, highly accurate test to predict whether a person will develop dementia.
The method, created by researchers from Queen Mary University of London, can be used up to nine years before a diagnosis and can predict dementia with more than 80% accuracy.
To create the predictive test, the team used functional MRI (fMRI) scanning—a non-invasive brain imaging technique—to detect changes in the brain's "default mode network," or DMN.
This network, which spans multiple brain regions, is one of the first to be affected by conditions like Alzheimer's disease, which is the most common cause of dementia.
The DMN is active when people are not engaged in a specific mental task, for example, when daydreaming or recalling memories. In other words, it is activated when we are simply thinking without any explicit goal in mind, rather than when we are engaged in a cognitive task that requires our full attention.
Using the fMRI scans of more than 1,100 people from the U.K. Biobank medical database, the researchers examined the connectivity between 10 regions of the brain that make up the DMN.
Each patient's brain connectivity pattern was then assessed to see if it indicated dementia. They were then given a prediction as to whether they would develop the condition.
Afterwards, the researchers compared these predictions to the medical data of each study participant.
They found that this method accurately predicted the onset of dementia up to nine years before an official diagnosis was made. The test was also able to predict how long it would take a diagnosis to be made within a two-year margin of error, in the cases where the study participants did develop dementia.
Additionally, the researchers found that the genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease was strongly linked with connectivity changes in the DMN.
Currently, dementia is detected and diagnosed using mental ability tests that check memory and other cognitive abilities, as well as brain scans.
Lead study author and neurologist Charles Marshall said in a statement: "Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia.
"Although we are getting better at detecting the proteins in the brain that can cause Alzheimer's disease, many people live for decades with these proteins in their brain without developing symptoms of dementia.
"We hope that the measure of brain function that we have developed will allow us to be much more precise about whether someone is actually going to develop dementia, and how soon, so that we can identify whether they might benefit from future treatments."
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Mental Health.
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