الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 156 |  |  |
| | | from | 156 | | |
Abstract
Dementia is a major health problem among senior population with AD is the main cause among living people above age of 65 years. Early diagnosis of dementia has always been a challenge, but with increased medical care and human longevity, and with presence of new therapeutic hopes in the era of disease modifying therapies including monoclonal antibodies and small molecules either already approved medications or pipeline drugs; early diagnosis is a must. There are some diagnostic techniques that are used alone or in combination to diagnose AD earlier before symptoms ensue and decline in patient’s cognition becomes inevitable like amyloid PET scan, measuring CSF amyloid and tau to apply the A/t/N diagnostic model for AD, but those investigative tools are not yet widely approved beyond research purposes nor included in the insurance cost for those patients, hence the need for less costing and much easier to get or interpret investigative tools, so in this limited research a hypothesis of efficacy of minimally invasive laboratory evaluation of plasma tau level in subjects with cognitive decline that goes far beyond expected with normal ageing after exclusion of other causes for cognitive decline (and following the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for major neurocognitive disorders) e.g. previous major cerebrovascular stroke or chronic medical condition combined with feasible, applicable, easily interpreted and much less expensive radio diagnostic tools like MRS and DTI of the brain showed a hope in making diagnosis of AD much easier and at very early stages of the disease. This can help in making early diagnosis and when used on a larger population scale maybe we can integrate it as a routine investigation panel for those who are suffering from cognitive decline in one or more cognitive domains and those subjects could be recruited in therapeutic trials. The results of our limited study showed changes in the plasma tau level and changes in the spectroscopic NAA/Cr ratios, and in DTI fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity of the suspected brain areas to be involved early in the AD which need to be reproduced on large scale of subjects to examine for the consistency and endurance of these results and recruit this investigation to be used in diagnosis of dementia and improve quality of life of senior people by early diagnosis and treatment of dementia and not just giving symptomatic treatment.