SCIENCE@home

HMPAO-SPECT can discriminate between Patients with Subjective Cognitive Complaints with and without Cognitive Deficits and those with Mild Cognitive Impairment.

F. Rossini,H. Zauner,J. Bergmann,M. Kronbichler,I. Spindler,S. Golaszewski,E. Trinka,W. Staffen

Published 2019 in Current Alzheimer Research

ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND Growing evidence suggests that pathological processes leading to Alzheimer's dementia occur gradually and begin to develop decades before the earliest clinical symptoms occur. The use of biomarkers has been proposed to detect in asymptomatic subjects evidence of preclinical Alzheimer's pathologic change. Subjective cognitive complaints (SCC) ie self-reported cognitive decline with normal cognition have been reported as an indicator of future cognitive decline, however this condition is unspecific. OBJECTIVE In the present study we used compared the regional brain perfusion measured by HMPAO-SPECT as Biomarker of neurodegeneration to compare the regional brain perfusion of patient with subjective cognitive complaints with and without minimal cognitive dysfunction (SCC+ and SCC- respectively) in respect to patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). METHOD We retrospectively examined 736 Patients who referred to our Memory Clinic because of suspected cognitive dysfunction. After exclusion of patients with overt dementia, automated, quantitatively assessed relative cerebral blood flow of 10 forebrain regions (thalamus, parietotemporal, medial temporal, posterior temporal, posterior cingulate gyrus, each region left hemispheric and right hemispheric) and neuropsychological assessment of 64 SCC (32 SCC+; 32 SCC-) and 28 MCI subjects were analysed. RESULTS Left hemispheric medial temporal region could significantly discriminate between all three groups, with a progressive decrease in perfusion from SCC- towards MCI. Area under the curve of left medial temporal region showed a sensitivity of 0,61 and a specificity of 0,78 for discriminating MCI from SCC-.The most relevant differences between groups in cognitive performance concerned verbal memory. CONCLUSIONS Automated analysis of HMPAO-SPECT data of MCI and SCC+ patients showed significant perfusion differences in medial temporal region and impaired verbal memory, both of which are known features of Alzheimer's dementia. Perfusion patterns and verbal memory performance in SCC+ are more similar to MCI than SCC-. Thus, SPECT analysis could distinguish those subjects whose perfusion pattern resembles that of an MCI from those who don't. In our opinion, this could identify two populations with a different risk of progression to AD, with SCC+ subjects needing further diagnostic examination and repeated follow-up.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-55 of 55 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY