Researchers find brain activity that precedes onset of Alzheimer's symptoms

Good news! Will we have checkups in the near future for this neurodegenerative disease?

"... The research found that a pathological brain activity precedes the onset of Alzheimer's first symptoms by many years: increased activity in the hippocampus during anesthesia and sleep, resulting from failure in the mechanism that stabilizes the neural network. ...
"According to the recent study published this month in the Lancet Public Health journal, the number of people with dementia worldwide will increase from 50 million in 2019 to more than 150 million in 2050, growing by about 370% in North Africa and the Middle East ..."

From the abstract:

"Dysregulated homeostasis of neural activity has been hypothesized to drive Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathogenesis. AD begins with a decades-long presymptomatic phase, but whether homeostatic mechanisms already begin failing during this silent phase is unknown. We show that before the onset of memory decline and sleep disturbances, familial AD (fAD) model mice display no deficits in CA1 mean firing rate (MFR) during active wakefulness. However, homeostatic down-regulation of CA1 MFR is disrupted during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep and general anesthesia in fAD mouse models. The resultant hyperexcitability is attenuated by the mitochondrial dihydroorotate dehydrogenase (DHODH) enzyme inhibitor, which tunes MFR toward lower set-point values. Ex vivo fAD mutations impair downward MFR homeostasis, resulting in pathological MFR set points in response to anesthetic drug and inhibition blockade. Thus, firing rate dyshomeostasis of hippocampal circuits is masked during active wakefulness but surfaces during low-arousal brain states, representing an early failure of the silent disease stage."

TAU finds brain activity that precedes onset of Alzheimer's symptoms - The Jerusalem Post The researchers said that low-arousal states such as sleep and anesthesia expose failures in a mechanism that regulates stability of brain activity in the pre-symptomatic stage of Alzheimer's.

Disrupted neural correlates of anesthesia and sleep reveal early circuit dysfunctions in Alzheimer models (open access)