Clarifying the Vascular Aspects of Dementia; Natural History Study
Cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), a common cerebrovascular small vessel disease (SVD), is a frequently (98%) found co-morbidity at autopsy in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Current in vivo hallmarks of CAA represent changes relatively late in the disease process and leaves CAA in AD often undetected. Recently, it was shown that decreased vascular reactivity (VR) measured with blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) MRI, after visual stimulus, is an early CAA marker. With BOLD-MRI to detect decreased VR in different stages of AD, it was shown that increasing stages of AD associate with decreasing VR independent of age, classic SVD markers and atrophy. Moreover, VR is associated with cognitive deficits. Therefore, cross-sectional data indicate that decreased VR is an important co-morbidity already in early stages of AD with an independent effect on disease severity. In this respect, the study aim is to determine the natural course of the decrease of VR in both controls and (early stage) AD patients to monitor AD disease progression. This is an essential step to aid in the development and application of effective treatment as it is expected that CAA can cause/worsen AD pathology.
• For this study three different routes for inclusion exists. Inclusion criteria for each group separately are shown below.
‣ Participants who were included in our previous CASCADE study (P19.039).
• Capable of giving informed consent (see appendix)
⁃ Patients who attended a memory clinic within one year ago
• Diagnosed with (mixed) probable AD
∙ Diagnosed as MCI
∙ Diagnosed as SCI
∙ Age between 50-90 years
∙ Capable of giving informed consent (see appendix)
⁃ Control subjects
• Healthy adults without memory complaints
∙ Age between 50 -90 years
∙ Capable of giving informed consent