Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative pathology that leads to cognitive decline and dementia, particularly in older adults. It disrupts brain structure and function, with neurotoxic amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques being a primary pathological hallmark. Pharmacotherapeutic trials targeting Aβ and other AD pathological features aim to slow disease progression. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive tool that visualizes brain functional activity, aiding in evaluating the efficacy of AD drugs in clinical trials.
Objective: This mini-review explores the role of fMRI in evaluating the impact of AD pharmacotherapeutic clinical trials conducted in the past seven years.
Methods: Literature was systematically searched using two databases. The risk of bias was assessed with the Revised Cochrane risk-of-bias tool (RoB-2) for randomized clinical trials (RCTs).
Results: Four studies using fMRI to investigate AD drug efficacy were included. Cholinesterase, glutamatergic, and serotonergic drugs showed significant positive effects on brain functional activity, especially within the default mode network. Functional connectivity (FC) changes due to drug intake were linked to cerebellar and cholinergic decline in AD, correlating with improved global cognition and fMRI task performance.
Conclusions: Recent RCTs demonstrate fMRI's ability to reveal longitudinal FC pattern changes in response to AD drug treatments across disease stages. Positive FC changes in distinct brain regions suggest potential compensatory mechanisms from drug intake. However, these drugs have limited efficacy, necessitating further research to enhance specific pharmacological interventions for clinical application.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/JAD-231276 | DOI Listing |
Endocrine
January 2025
Department of Endocrinology and Metabolic Diseases, Manisa Celal Bayar University Hospital, Manisa, Turkey.
Purpose: Our study evaluated skeletal muscle mass, function and quality among mild autonomous cortisol secretion (MACS) patients and non-functioning adrenal incidentaloma (NFAI) patients in comparison with the control group without adrenal mass.
Methods: 63 NFAI (49 female, 14 male) and 31 MACS (24 female, 7 male) patients were included in the study. As the control group, 44 patients (31 women, 13 men) who were known to have no radiological adrenal pathology on computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging performed for other reasons were selected.
Sci Rep
January 2025
Research Unit of Health Sciences and Technology, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland.
Optical techniques, such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), contain high potential for the development of non-invasive wearable systems for evaluating cerebral vascular condition in aging, due to their portability and ability to monitor real-time changes in cerebral hemodynamics. In this study, thirty-six healthy adults were measured by single channel fNIRS to explore differences between two age groups using machine learning (ML). The subjects, measured during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at Oulu University Hospital, were divided into young (age ≤ 32) and elderly (age ≥ 57) groups.
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January 2025
Department of Ophthalmology, West China Hospital of Sichuan University, No.37, Guoxue Xiang, Chengdu, 610041, Sichuan, China.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) combined with periorbital triamcinolone acetonide injection in treating thyroid eye disease (TED) patients with active extraocular muscle but low CAS. The retrospective observational study was conducted. A total of 156 eligible patients were selected from the TED patient database of the Ophthalmology Department of West China Hospital of Sichuan University.
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January 2025
Instituto de Investigaciones en Biodiversidad y Biotecnología (INBIOTEC-CONICET), Fundación para Investigaciones Biológicas Aplicadas (FIBA), Mar del Plata, 7600, Argentina.
The fungal green synthesis of nanoparticles (NPs) has gained great interest since it is a cost-effective and easy handling method. The process is simple because fungi secrete metabolites and proteins capable of reducing metal salts in aqueous solution, however the mechanism remains largely unknown. The aim of this study was to analyze the secretome of a Trichoderma harzianum strain during the mycobiosynthesis process of zinc and iron nanoparticles.
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January 2025
Department of Electrical Electronical Engineering, Yaşar University, Bornova, İzmir, Turkey.
We aimed to build a robust classifier for the MGMT methylation status of glioblastoma in multiparametric MRI. We focused on multi-habitat deep image descriptors as our basic focus. A subset of the BRATS 2021 MGMT methylation dataset containing both MGMT class labels and segmentation masks was used.
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