Predicting Progression of Alzheimer’s Disease With Magnetic Resonance

Abstract

Advances in the field of molecular biology concerning Alzheimer's disease (AD) generate the possibility of useful therapeutic interventions in the near future. The major beneficiaries of disease-modifying treatments that are currently under development will be those patients who have early pathological involvement. Improved methods for early diagnosis and noninvasive surrogates of disease severity in AD are crucial for early therapeutic interventions and for measuring their effectiveness. Various quantitative magnetic resonance (MR) techniques that measure the anatomic, biochemical, microstructural, functional, and bloodflow changes are being evaluated as possible surrogate measures of disease progression. Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies indicate that MR-based volume measurements are potential surrogates of disease progression in AD, starting from the preclinical stages. The recent development of amyloid imaging tracers for positron emission tomography has been a major breakthrough in the field of imaging markers for AD. Efforts to image plaques also are underway in MRI. As with indirect MR measures, the approaches that directly image the pathological substrate will need to undergo a validation process by longitudinal studies to prove their usefulness as predictors of AD.