White matter hyperintensities (WMH) White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are brain lesions visible on MRI that have traditionally been linked to vascular disease. In a previous study from our group, we showed that WMH burden increases approximately 10 years before the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) symptoms in people with Down syndrome (DS) and continues to … Read more
The first step in the diagnostic workup of individuals presenting with cognitive symptoms is to determine whether there is objective cognitive impairment. Ideally, this is done through a neuropsychological evaluation: a battery of cognitive tests in which the patient’s performance is interpreted as normal or abnormal as compared to reference values. These reference values are … Read more
Cerebral perfusion is the amount of blood reaching a given brain region at any given time. In other words, it is the “irrigation” that supplies neurons with oxygen and nutrients. When perfusion decreases or becomes abnormally distributed, it may indicate that an area is beginning to deteriorate, even before clinical symptoms or signs of atrophy … Read more
Blood biomarkers have become a key tool for diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease in a more accessible way. While plasma p-tau217 is already established as a strong diagnostic marker, little was known about its ability to predict how the disease progresses across different clinical stages. In this study, published in Neurology, we show that plasma p-tau217 is … Read more
New biomarker-centric diagnostic frameworks for Alzheimer’s disease promise earlier detection but risk over-medicalising people who may never decline. Grasso, Santos-Santos and Clark contend that amyloid-β or phosphorylated-tau positivity in cognitively normal adults should be treated as an _elevated risk_ rather than a definitive diagnosis, and they show why cognitive reserve, sociocultural context and structural inequities … Read more
Medial Temporal Lobe Atrophy in Down Syndrome Along the Alzheimer’s Disease Continuum The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is one of the first regions affected by tau pathology, making structural changes in these areas promising biomarkers for identifying early signs of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, little is known about the integrity of these regions in individuals … Read more