Using a special brain scan, Dutch psychologists have found differences between the brains of elderly people with poor memory and good memory, suggesting that the scan could allow earlier diagnosis and treatment of dementia.
Researchers from the Free University of Amsterdam scanned various brain areas and found that in elderly people with poor memory there is less activity in the mediotemporal lobe, part of the brain known to be involved in the memory process.
Researchers administered memory tests to subjects who were scanned using functional MRI. Besides making standard scans, functional MRI shows the quantity of oxygen used in different brain parts. Since active parts use more oxygen, researchers could see which parts of the brain were active during task performance.
One of the subjects’ tasks was to state whether words in a list caused pleasant or unpleasant associations. They then had their recall of the words unexpectedly tested.
Those who displayed poorer recall during the test also had less activity in the mediotemporal lobe.
Standard MRI scans showed no difference in the lobe’s shape for elderly people with poor or good memory.
Functional MRI might therefore allow earlier differentiation between normal memory problems and the initial stages of dementia.
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