Visuospatial perception: an emerging biomarker for Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

In recent years, the focus of research on Alzheimer's disease (AD) has shifted toward finding reliable diagnostic biomarkers that enable accurate detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as well as AD. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has the potential to identify functional changes in the preclinical stages of AD. In addition to the cardinal deficits in memory, deficits in visuospatial cognition are pervasive in AD. Recent neurophysiological and imaging studies have revealed that changes in visuospatial perception (VSP) functions can be detected in the early stages of AD. This review highlights the scope of VSP functional alterations as a biomarker for AD. We describe the neuroanatomical regions involved in the processing of various VSP tasks, and discuss the effect of AD on these regions from a pathological as well as a functional point of view. A comprehensive synopsis of the existing fMRI literature that has assessed VSP in patients with MCI and AD has been provided. The diagnostic scope of monitoring the brain activation correlates of VSP processing in AD is discussed in terms of the key advantages of utilizing VSP-related deficits in AD for early detection and longitudinal tracking of AD.