MRS in Mild Cognitive Impairment

Development of new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative conditions has become of increasing societal importance given our aging population and increasing longevity, combined with the fact that this disease typically begins late in life. Early diagnosis and treatment of AD is crucial to sustaining the quality of life of many elderly individuals and their families. While there are no proven treatments that can reverse AD pathology, treatments that can arrest or slow down disease progression generate the prospect for preventive interventions. There is considerable interest in early diagnosis by identifying individuals with cognitive difficulties who eventually progress to dementia, from those who are aging with normal cognitive function. The syndrome of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) was established in order to identify such individuals who have prodromal AD. MCI is characterized by a cognitive complaint, cognitive function not normal for age, a decline in cognition, essentially normal functional activities, and not demented 1 . Non-invasive neuroimaging techniques such as 1 H magnetic resonance spectroscopy ( 1 H MRS) may have an important role in the clinical evaluation of dementia for early diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and monitoring of disease activity starting from the MCI stage 2 . The neuronal metabolite NAA is consistently found to be lower and the glial metabolite mI is found to be higher in the 1 H MR spectra of patients with MCI and AD than cognitively normal elderly 3-12 and with increasing AD pathology at autopsy 13 . There are conflicting reports