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Eyes reveal early Alzheimer’s disease

Reduced blood capillaries are new way to diagnose early cognitive impairment

Date:

April 5, 2019

Source:

Northwestern University

Summary:

Reduced blood capillaries in the back of the eye may be a new, noninvasive way to diagnose early cognitive impairment, the precursor to Alzheimer’s disease in which individuals become forgetful, reports a new study. Scientists detected these vascular changes in the human eye noninvasively, with an infrared camera and without the need for dyes or expensive MRI scanners. Read More

Scientists detected these vascular changes in the human eye non-invasively, with an infrared camera and without the need for dyes or expensive MRI scanners. The back of the eye is optically accessible to a new type of technology (OCT angiography) that can quantify capillary changes in detail and with unparalleled resolution, making the eye an ideal mirror for what is going on in the brain.

“Once our results are validated, this approach could potentially provide an additional type of biomarker to identify individuals at high risk of progressing to Alzheimer’s,” said Dr. Amani Fawzi, a professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine physician. “These individuals can then be followed more closely and could be prime candidates for new therapies aimed at slowing down the progression of the disease or preventing the onset of the dementia associated with Alzheimer’s.”

It’s known that patients with Alzheimer’s have decreased retinal blood flow and vessel density but it had not been known if these changes are also present in individuals with early Alzheimer’s or forgetful mild cognitive impairment who have a higher risk for progressing to dementia.

Weintraub and her team at the Northwestern Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease recruited 32 participants who had cognitive testing consistent with the forgetful type of cognitive impairment, and age-, gender- and race- matched them to subjects who tested as cognitively normal for their age. All individuals underwent the eye imaging with OCT angiography. The data were analyzed to identify whether the vascular capillaries in the back of the eye were different between the two groups of individuals.

Reference:

Yi Stephanie Zhang, Nina Zhou, Brianna Marie Knoll, Sahej Samra, Mallory R. Ward, Sandra Weintraub, Amani A. Fawzi. Parafoveal vessel loss and correlation between peripapillary vessel density and cognitive performance in amnestic mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer’s disease on optical coherence tomography angiography. PLOS ONE, 2019; 14 (4): e0214685 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214685