LONDON, April 9 (UPI) -- British researchers suggest brain activity already present in young people may be associated later with Alzheimer's disease.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may be a step towards a diagnostic test to identify individuals at risk for Alzheimer's.
The Oxford University and Imperial College London researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare activity inside the brains of 36 volunteers aged between 20 and 35 years -- 18 carrying at least one copy of the gene APOE4 associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer's and 18 non-carriers acting as controls.
Comparing how the volunteers' brains behaved while they were performing a memory-related task and while resting, the researchers could see that carriers and non-carriers each had distinct patterns of brain activity.
"We were surprised to see that even when the volunteers carrying APOE4 weren't being asked to do anything, you could see the memory part of the brain working harder than it was in the other volunteers," study lead author Dr Clare Mackay of Oxford says in statement.
"Not all APOE4 carriers go on to develop Alzheimer's, but it would make sense if in some people, the memory part of the brain effectively becomes exhausted from overwork and this contributes to the disease."
