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Clinicians may one day be able to identify predementia through neuroimaging of abnormal brain activity decades before Alzheimer disease (AD) can be diagnosed clinically. These researchers used functional MRI (fMRI) to investigate differences in brain activation during performance of memory tasks in five members of a family with familial AD; in this family, an autosomal-dominant presenilin mutation has led to AD, typically by age 48.
The researchers identified increased hippocampal and frontotemporal activation during an episodic-memory task in a 20-year-old mutation carrier and decreased activation in these regions in a 45-year-old mutation carrier, compared with activation in the three family members without the mutation (one middle-aged an…