Early Signs

Alzheimer’s disease ravages the brain well before patients start to experience memory loss. In an ideal world, pre-symptomatic treatments could slow or even stop the eventual and irreversible degeneration of brain tissue. Unfortunately, these early stages can only be detected post-mortem, typically by looking for neurofibrillary tangles (shown in red in this brain section); these protein clusters are one of the earliest biological indicators of disease onset. However, scientists have recently shown that there may also be psychiatric indicators. Analysing post-mortem brains, the team found that individuals who hadn’t started experiencing memory loss but had neurofibrillary tangles in a particular brain region were more likely to have suffered from anxiety, changes in appetite, difficulties sleeping, and depression. Such symptoms aren’t necessarily causative, but may be a warning that the disease is picking up speed, so giving some hope of earlier diagnosis and even of new therapies to slow its onset.

Written by Gaëlle Coullon

Gaëlle Coullon

Writer

Gaëlle is a consultant and trainer in research communication and commercialisation. As an ex-neuroscientist, she is always looking for new ways to combine her love of writing with everything brain related.

• Image from the Grinberg Lab, UCSF
• Memory and Aging Center, Weill Institute for Neurosciences, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, October 2018