WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - A new study from the labs of Sylvain Baillet at The Neuro and Sylvia Villeneuve at the Douglas Research Centre explored the link between amyloid-beta and tau proteins, and cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients.
To investigate this connection, the research team led by Jonathan Gallego Rudolf, recruited 104 people with a family history of Alzheimer's. They scanned the participants' brains using a combination of positron emission tomography or PET, and magnetoencephalography or MEG.
The scans revealed that brain areas with increased levels of amyloid-beta exhibited brain hyperactivity, reflected by increased fast-frequency and decreased slow-frequency brain activity.
Meanwhile, in individuals with both proteins in their brain, the pattern shifted to hypoactivity, with more significant pathology leading to brain activity slowing.
'Our study provides direct evidence in humans for the hypothesized shift in neurophysiological activity, from neural hyper- to hypo-activity, and its association with longitudinal cognitive decline. These results parallel findings from animal and computational models and contribute to the advancement of our understanding of the pathological mechanisms underlying the preclinical stage of Alzheimer's disease,' said Rudolf.
In a follow-up study, Rudolf plans to rescan the same participants to determine whether the accumulation of these proteins leads to further brain activity slowing, and whether this predicts the cognitive decline in the participants.
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