A study from Karolinska Institutet claims that an early stage of Alzheimer's disease is characterised by a spike in metabolism in the hippocampus, a region of the brain. In Sweden, the most frequent type of dementia affects roughly 20,000 people annually.
Recent studies have demonstrated that an early sign of the illness is a metabolic increase in the mitochondria, or cellular power plants. The study's researchers employed mice that developed Alzheimer's disease pathology in a manner comparable to that of humans. The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was given for the discovery that disturbance to the cellular recycling mechanism induced synaptic alterations in young mice after an increase in metabolism.
"The disease starts to develop 20 years before the onset of symptoms, so it's important to detect it early -- especially given the retardant medicines that are starting to arrive," says Per Nilsson, associate professor at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet. "Metabolic changes can be a diagnostic factor in this.”
Maria Ankarcrona, a professor at the same department, said, "Interestingly, changes in metabolism can be seen before any of the characteristic insoluble plaques have accumulated in the brain. The different energy balance tallies with what we've seen in images of the Alzheimer brain, but we've now detected these changes at an earlier stage.”
