It would be possible to detect amyloid plaques, indicative of Alzheimer’s disease, with a simple retinography.
Alzheimer’s disease cannot be cured. Cognitive degeneration is irreversible, and the pathology irreparably evolves into increasingly severe symptoms. The only clarification for patients and their entourage: if it is taken care of early, it is possible to slow down its development.
Research into diagnostic methods is therefore one of the areas of research on Alzheimer’s. And progress is being made. Doctors at the famous Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles (United States) say that with a simple photo of the fundus of the eye, it would be possible to detect the disease at an early stage.
A simple test
Early detection is already possible. But it is generally based on an interrogation, followed by imaging examinations or search for markers via a lumbar puncture. Sometimes heavy and expensive diagnostic tests.
What American doctors offer is a simple, minimally invasive and inexpensive alternative. It consists of injecting a fluorescent substance into patients. This will attach to amyloid plaques, clusters of proteins which, by their accumulation, are, at least in part, responsible for the degeneration of neurons in Alzheimer’s disease.
Then, by retinography, that is to say a photographic image of the retina, these plaques revealed by the fluorescent product can be observed.
Proof of concept
And the method seems to work, based on the results of experiments that doctors at Cedars-Sinai conducted, and that they publish in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. They showed that amyloid plaques were more numerous on the retinas of patients with the disease. In mice, then in humans.
They were also able to observe in people affected by Alzheimer’s, living as well as deceased, that the amount of amyloid plaques in the brain and on the retina were correlated. In other words, the advancement of the disease could be assessed through retinography.
Other ongoing trials
This proof of concept has already given birth to a startup, NeuroVision Imaging, which is trying to promote the technique. A larger-scale trial has already been launched, on healthy patients over 65 years old.
The approximately 400 participants will be followed over several years, and will undergo regular examinations. This test will make it possible to validate the predictive nature of retinography, if it succeeds in detecting early cases of Alzheimer’s before the onset of other symptoms.
.
