He and his colleagues devised a study to prospectively identify which brain regions would be activated on functional MRI scans during memory tasks, and to see whether those changes correlated with memory impairment patients across the spectrum from cognitively intact to mildly demented.
They enrolled 75 men and women, mean age 72.9 + 7.2 into the study. Thirteen of the patients had a diagnosis of mild Alzheimer's disease, 34 had amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and 28 served as healthy controls.
The patients underwent functional MRI scan in a 4.0 Tesla magnet while they performed novel encoding and familiar encoding of face-name pairs.
The investigators assessed blood oxygen level-dependent changes across the entire brain for each group of participants.
