Scientists have discovered the symptoms that are associated with the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease, which are difficult to diagnose because of the minimal changes in the brain. These include such common symptoms as anxiety, loss of appetite and sleep disorder. It is reported by the Journal of Alzheimers Disease.
The authors believe that it can help early diagnosis of the disease, and in the future the development of a new treatment. It will also provide a better understanding of the nature of these symptoms in people in adulthood.
Earlier Alzheimer’s disease have been linked to listed the nervous and mental symptoms, they even offered to be considered early markers of the disease. But their correlation with the disease remained unclear. For example, scientists have postulated that depression and other mental problems, as well as medications for their treatment can be triggers of the disease, which develops over decades.
Now a team of American and Brazilian scientists have clearer results. They argue that psychiatric conditions and symptoms are not the cause of Alzheimer’s disease, they early symptoms.
Researchers have used the results of protectory in são Paulo (Brazil), which produces about 15,000 autopsies a year. They studied a huge number of samples of brain tissue of people. The authors have focused on the study of samples from younger patients with morphological signs of dementia.
Scientists examined the brains of 1092 people over 50 years who during his life had a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, 455 samples were found signs of degeneration of the nervous tissue-type of Alzheimer’s disease.
The authors used statistical algorithms to establish a link between a certain stage of Alzheimer’s disease and the symptoms that were observed in these people in life. It was discovered that people who have not been found impaired memory, but there were early changes in the brain, usually meeting one or more of the following symptoms: anxiety, change in appetite, depression or a sleep disorder.
The next morphological stage to these signs was added agitation. But characteristic of the disease, memory loss and delirium appeared only later, when changes in the brain spread to the cortex of the hemispheres.
Knowledge of the early signs of Alzheimer’s disease particularly valuable at present as the early confirmation of the diagnosis. It also gives scientists the opportunity to study the therapy of the disease in the early stages.
Ukrainian Andrei