The build up of a certain plaque in the brain may provide an early indicator of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and give insight as to the causes of memory loss in elderly patients.

“Because of the promise of these therapies, we want to identify people who are at really high risk for the disease, but don’t have symptoms yet,” said William Jagust, a scientist at the University of California-Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. He was aided in the study by Berkley graduate student Elizabeth Mormino and other scientists. Their work has been published online in the journal Brain.

Their research revealed that the higher the levels of a type of plaque called beta-amyloid that is found in the brain, the more likely that brain is to have a smaller hippocampus. That part of brain is where new memories form. Additionally, a person in this condition will have a more difficult time remembering things connected to specific times and places. This is called “episodic memory,” and examples include recalling what a person had for lunch or where they put their sunglasses.

The presence of the beta-amyloid plaque doesn’t necessarily mean that person will become an Alzheimer’s patient. However, Jagust said when the plaque, episodic memory loss and a reduced hippocampus occur together, it should not be ignored.

“These changes in older people are not necessarily benign. When you start to cluster them together, it begins to sound like Alzheimer’s disease,” he said. “And this suggests that some of the changes we are detecting in normal older people may be indicative of the subsequent development of Alzheimer’s.”

The study was conducted on 20 elderly people who showed no indication of cognitive impairment, and the results conformed to other research on people already suffering from Alzheimer’s. The difference-maker in this project is that it was conducted on “cognitively normal” subjects.

“We wouldn’t say they have they have Alzheimer’s by any stretch of the imagination,” Jagust said. “But the fact that these things occur together makes us consider the possibility that this is a very early change in the brain that could be leading to Alzheimer’s disease.”

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