Abstract #3324

Whole Brain N-Acetylaspartate Quantification Comparison Between Healthy Elderly, Mild Cognitively Impaired and Alzheimers Patients: Evidence for Different Clinical Cohorts

Amit Gokhale¹, Lidia Glodzik¹, Songtao Liu¹, Juchen Hirsch², L Achtnichts², A Monsch³, Achim Gass², Oded Gonen¹

¹Radiology, NYU School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA; ²Neurology, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland; ³Neurology, University of Basel, Basel, Bas, Switzerland

The very large - in the millions and fast-growing number of Alzheimers disease (AD) patients motivates a search of preferably non invasive markers that could detect the diseases at its earliest possible stage. Since, AD is known to be a neuronal dysfunction; MR spectroscopy has a specific marker for it the N-acetylaspartate (NAA). Furthermore, since AD is a diffuse disorder, whole-brain NAA (WBNAA) spectroscopy is the most appropriate tool. In this study we applied WBNAA to controls, Mild cognitively impaired individuals (believed to be early AD) and AD patients to quantify the detectable differences between these three populations.