الفهرس 
ANATOMY OF THE BRAINOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 97 |  |  |
| | | from | 97 | | |
Abstract
Alzheimer’s’ disease is one of the most common cause of dementia. It results due to pathological changes that take place in the brain due to progressive accumulation of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that begin an inflammatory process ending by neurodegenerative changes and development of dementia.
Early diagnosis includes recognition of the pre-dementia conditions, such as the identification of people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or with a high risk of developing AD. This Would allow early treatment using currently available therapies, that improve or stabilize cognition more efficiently when administered in the early stages of the disease, Using new therapies in the future is a second issue to be considered.
A number of in vivo neuroimaging techniques, which can reliably and non invasively assess aspects of neuroanatomy, chemistry, physiology, and pathology, hold promise as biomarkers. These neuroimaging measures appear to relate closely to neuropathological and clinical data, such as rate of cognitive decline and risk of future decline.
Thus, the future role of imaging in patients with AD is to exclude other causes of dementia and to recognize the disease early in order to initiate appropriate therapy and delay functional and cognitive loss.
Especially MRI measurement are preferred over other imaging markers as single photon emission tomography and positron emission tomography as there is no need to use radioactive material. This allows imaging the patient repetitively through different disease stages.
MR imaging of AD is not expensive as regard the costs of caring for patients with AD which vary by disease severity and care setting.
Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies indicate that MR-based volume measurements are potential surrogates of disease progression in AD, starting from the preclinical stages. The validity of MR-based volumetry as a surrogate marker for therapeutic efficacy in AD remains to be tested in a positive disease-modifying drug trial.
Beside MR volumetry, several more recent imaging techniques have shown a potential to detect early abnormalities in AD that may be useful in the clinical diagnosis of dementias. These techniques include perfusion, Diffusion, spectroscopy, functional MRI, and microscopy. They therefore have the potential to depict functional deficiencies in early course of the disease.
Recent development of amyloid imaging tracers for positron emission tomography has been a major breakthrough in the field of imaging markers for AD. Efforts to image plaques are also underway in MR imaging. As with indirect MR measures, these approaches of directly imaging the pathological substrate will need to undergo a validation process with longitudinal studies to prove their usefulness as surrogate markers in AD.
Finally, quality of life for patients with Alzheimer’s disease is an important point that must he considered and not to be ignored simply because it is the right of these elder patients