Summer papers

News papers just came up. Once more, they result from great collaborations with researchers from Caen (Inserm u1077, Gaël Chételat) and UC Berkeley/UCSF (Bill Jagust, Gil Rabinovici).

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Audrey Perrotin, PhD (Inserm u1077, Caen) focused on patients with Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD), who seek help in a memory clinic but show no significant deficits on standard cognitive tests. Yet, these patients are at increased risk of  developing Alzheimer’s and they have recently become a population of high interest for research on preclinical AD  (see Jessen et al., 2014). In this study, Audrey looked at hippocampal subfield atrophy in 17 patients recruited from our local memory clinic, compared to 40 healthy controls (who never attended a memory clinic) and 21 patients at the dementia stage of AD. The main results of this study is that individuals with SCD already have an AD-like pattern of hippocampal atrophy (with major atropy of CA1 and the subiculum). This paper will soon be published in a special edition of the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease on SCD.

Perrotin A, de Flores R, Poisnel G, La Joie R, de la Sayette V, Mézenge F, Tomadesso C, Landeau B, Desgranges B, Chételat G (in press). Hippocampal subfield volumetry and 3D surface mapping in subjective cognitive decline. JOURNAL OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

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In the second paper derived from my collaboration with Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD (UCSF), we studied early atrophy patterns in four clinical variants of AD (early onset, late onset, posterior cortical atrophy and logopenic aphasia). This paper included several complementary analyses of cognition and brain structure data, notably including the W-score map method I developed in a former paper (La Joie et al., J Neurosci 2012) and which Rik already used in a recent paper on “frontal” AD (Ossenkoppele et al., Brain 2015). Briefly, we showed that, even at the earliest clinical stage, patients with each syndrome showed both common and variant-specific atrophy. The paper is already available on the Human Brain Mapping Journal website.

Ossenkoppele R, Cohn-Sheehy BI, La Joie R, Vogel JW, Möller C, Lehmann M, van Berckel BNM, Seeley WW, Pijnenburg YA, Gorno-Tempini ML, Kramer JH, Barkhof F, Rosen HJ, van der Flier WM, Jagust WJ, Miller BL, Scheltens P, Rabinovici GD (in press). Atrophy Patterns in Early Clinical Stages Across Distinct Phenotypes of Alzheimer’s Disease. HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING