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. 2015 Mar 29;1(1):24-32.
doi: 10.1016/j.dadm.2014.12.001. eCollection 2015 Mar.

Atrophy of presubiculum and subiculum is the earliest hippocampal anatomical marker of Alzheimer's disease

Giovanni A Carlesimo  1 , Fabrizio Piras  2 , Maria Donata Orfei  2 , Mariangela Iorio  2 , Carlo Caltagirone  1 , Gianfranco Spalletta  3
Affiliations

Atrophy of presubiculum and subiculum is the earliest hippocampal anatomical marker of Alzheimer's disease

Giovanni A Carlesimo et al. Alzheimers Dement (Amst). .

Abstract

Background: There is no consensus about which hippocampal subfields become atrophic earliest in the course of Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Methods: Thirty AD patients, 41 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and 38 healthy controls (HCs) underwent cerebral magnetic resonance imaging (with an automated segmentation protocol for the volumetric analysis of hippocampal subfields) and a test of immediate and delayed recall of a 15-word list.

Results: The volumes of the presubiculum and subiculum presented the most remarkable reduction in the patient's groups. In the MCI group, only the volumes of presubiculum and subiculum predicted performance on the memory tests. In AD patients, the volumes of all hippocampal subfields (with the notable exception of the CA1) predicted memory scores.

Conclusions: Our data point to a prevalent atrophy of the presubicular-subicular complex from the early phases of AD. This finding is consistent with neuropathological observations in AD patients and probably reflects the severe degeneration of the perforant pathway while penetrating the hippocampus through the subicular field in its course from the entorhinal cortex to the dentate gyrus.

Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; Brain atrophy; Memory; Mild cognitive impairment; Structural MRI.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Subfield volumes in the MCI and AD samples. The figure shows a representative subfield segmentation of the left hippocampus of one subject (A), its 3D reconstruction (B), and the graph showing standardized z values of subfields volumes in the two samples (C). Sub, subiculum; PreSub, presubiculum; MCI, mild cognitive impairment; AD, Alzheimer's disease.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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