What Britney Spears Can Reveal About Alzheimer’s Disease

Author: admin

27 Aug

One of the many tragedies of Alzheimer’s disease is that patients don’t know until it’s too late that they actually have the condition. By the time the first signs of forgetfulness and confusion set in, experts believe, the disease has already been ravaging the brain for a decade or more, causing irreversible damage.

But researchers at the Cleveland Clinic report that they may have found a way to identify those most at risk of developing the neurological disorder long before symptoms develop – simply by asking them whether they recognize celebrities such as Britney Spears and Johnny Carson. It turns out that when people who are at highest risk of Alzheimer’s try to recognize a famous name, their brains activate in very different ways from those of people who aren’t at risk. And scientists can actually see this difference using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. (Read “Gingko Biloba Does Not Prevent Alzheimer’s.”)

In the journal Neurology, a team led by Stephen Rao, a brain-imaging specialist, describes a study of 69 healthy men and women aged 65 to 85. The researchers divided the group into three: those who had no risk factors for Alzheimer’s, those who had a family history of the disease but no genetic indicators of it themselves and those who had both family members with Alzheimer’s as well as a version of a gene for a protein called apolipoprotein E4 (ApoE4) that has been linked to the condition. They slid all of the subjects into an fMRI machine, and while the volunteers were there, they saw names of both famous and not-so-famous people flashed in front of them.

Rao’s team found that when volunteers saw names such as Britney Spears, George Clooney, Albert Einstein and Marilyn Monroe, those who were at the highest risk of developing Alzheimer’s – those with both the genetic makeup and a family history – showed high levels of activity in the hippocampus, posterior cingulate and regions of the frontal cortex, all areas involved in memory. The control group showed the opposite pattern. Their brains became more excited when they saw unfamiliar names, which included Irma Jacoby, Joyce O’Neil and Virginia Warfield. Next >>