An exciting month in terms of publications: three papers I was involved in just got accepted!
Sylvia Villeneuve – together with Gil Rabinovici and Bill Jagust – got their article on PiB-PET imaging accepted in Brain.
In this (monster!) paper, they analyzed PET images from healthy controls and patients, including both imaging and pathological data. They showed that the statistical thresholds that are generally used in the field are too high to capture individuals with low but still significant amyloid.
Villeneuve S, Rabinovici GD, Cohn-Sheehy BI, Madison C, Ayakta N, Ghosh PM, La Joie R, Arthur-Bentil SK, Vogel J, Marks SM, Lehmann M, Rosen HJ, Reed B, Olichney J, Boxer AL, Miller BL, Borys E, Jin LW, Huang EJ, Grinberg LT, DeCarli C, Seeley WW, Jagust WJ (in press). Existing thresholds for PIB positivity are too high: Statistical and Pathological Examination. BRAIN
Along with Sylvia Villeneuve (again!) and Miranka Wirth, my deart co-post docs from the Jagust lab, we published an opinion paper in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (click here to access the paper).
In this discussion, we questionned the typical topography of Alzheimer’s related brain injuries (as observed with structural MRI or FDG-PET) and proposed that these regions that are highly altered in Alzheimer’s disease might in fact be the convergence points of multiple pathologies: neurofibrillary tangles (tau), beta-amyloid, vascular…
Villeneuve S, Wirth M, La Joie R (2015). Are AD-typical regions the convergence point of multiple pathologies? – FRONTIERS IN AGING NEUROSCIENCE
Gaël Chételat and I collaborated with researchers from the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany), the university of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and the Copenhagen University Hospital (Denmark) for an interesting study on musical memory and the neural underpinnings of its preservation in Alzheimer’s disease.
Our colleagues ran a high resolution fMRI study in healthy young adults to identify regions involved in musical memory and we showed that these regions were among the least atrophic/hypometabolic areas in AD (using data derived from my Journal of Neuroscience 2012 paper).
Renaud La Joie 