Longitudinal Structural MRI & Alzheimer Disease

Dominic Holland¹, Linda K. McEvoy², Rahul S. Desikan², Anders M. Dale, ¹²

Longitudinal structural MRI enables sensitive quantification of change taking place in brain regions. When applied to Alzheimer disease, rates of structural change in specific brain regions offer potential outcome measures for clinical trials that are significantly more powerful than clinical measures, and can be combined with other baseline biomarkers for further significant enhancement of power. Rates of change can be measured with enough fidelity that annual rates of change as a function of baseline age can be calculated, revealing attenuation with increasing age in the relationship between rates of decline and disease severity, and enabling disease trajectories to be modeled.