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MRI offers new insights into dementia
Around 850,000 people in the UK are living with dementia - of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause - a debilitating and progressive neurological condition. And many more patients are expected to be diagnosed with dementia in the coming years.
Building on Nottingham’s world-leading heritage in the development of MRI, clinicians from Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) are working with researchers from the University of Nottingham to conduct a new clinical study into early stage Alzheimer’s, using high resolution (7 Tesla) MRI to provide very detailed scans of patients’ brains.
The study is being led by NUH Consultant Neurologist Dr Akram Hosseini. Healthy volunteers are currently being recruited from around Nottingham and the wider East Midlands to compare the results with the scans are being taken from patients who have early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Dr Hosseini said: “There is a pressing need to find new methods of diagnosing early signs of Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating condition which affects many people, including some who are still at working age.”
The trial, which is called BiTAN (Brain Iron Toxicity and Neurodegeneration) is primarily funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and designed to help improve researchers’ understanding of how iron accumulates in the brain and the relationship of this build-up to memory and thinking (cognition).
Researchers will use specific features on brain scans to monitor minor changes in the brain. This can help us understand and monitor the early changes during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and potentially pave the way to test new treatments that target iron in the brain for Alzheimer’s disease.
Dr Hosseini added: “This study is a golden opportunity to draw on the physics expertise at the Nottingham Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre for clinical research and biomedical sciences. Professor Richard Bowtell, who is director of the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, and I will be working together with other biomedical scientists in the University of Nottingham to apply new MRI sequences to identify and monitor minor changes in the brain.
“This study will find specific features from brain scans that may help clinicians improve the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease at its early stage of the disease and before the onset of dementia.
“We hope this study will produce a foundation for future research and ultimately help patients who have Alzheimer’s disease.”