Neuroimaging in Alzheimer's Disease for Early Diagnosis: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia in the elderly, affecting roughly half of those over the age of 85. We briefly discussed the risk factors, epidemiology, and treatment options for AD. The development of therapeutic therapies operating very early in the disease cascade has been spurred by the realization that the disease process begins at least a decade or more before the manifestation of symptoms. Thus, the clinical significance of early diagnosis was emphasized. Using various keywords, a literature search was carried out using PubMed and other databases. For inclusion, pertinent articles were chosen and reviewed. This article has reviewed different neuroimaging techniques that are considered advanced tools to aid in establishing a diagnosis and highlighted the advantages as well as disadvantages of those techniques. Besides, the prevalence of several in vivo biomarkers aided in discriminating affected individuals from healthy controls in the early stages of the disease. Each imaging method has its advantages and disadvantages, hence no single imaging approach can be the optimum modality for diagnosis. This article also commented on a better approach to using these techniques to increase the likelihood of an early diagnosis.

Keywords: alzheimer's disease; amyloid pet; early diagnosis; fdg pet; functional magnetic resonance imaging; neuroimaging; structural mri; tau-protein.