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First-of-Its-Kind Test Can Predict Dementia up to Nine Years Before Diagnosis

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Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Researchers have developed an innovative method for predicting dementia with over 80% accuracy, up to nine years before diagnosis. Using functional MRI to analyze the default mode network of the brain, the team could identify early signs of dementia by comparing brain connectivity patterns with genetic and health data from UK Biobank volunteers. This method not only improves early detection but also helps in understanding the interaction between genetic factors, social isolation, and Alzheimer’s disease.Queen Mary University researchers have created a method to predict dementia with high accuracy years before diagnosis by analyzing brain network connectivity using fMRI scans.Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have created a new technique that predicts dementia with over 80% accuracy up to nine years prior to diagnosis. This method surpasses traditional approaches like memory tests and measurements of brain shrinkage, two commonly used methods for diagnosing dementia.The team, led by Professor Charles Marshall, developed the predictive test by analyzing functional MRI (fMRI) scans to detect changes in the brain’s ‘default mode network’ (DMN). The DMN connects regions of the brain to perform specific cognitive functions and is the first neural network to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease.The researchers used fMRI scans from over 1,100 volunteers from UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing genetic and health information from half a million UK participants, to estimate the effective connectivity between ten regions of the brain that constitute the default mode network. Predictive Accuracy and MethodologyThe researchers assigned each patient with a probability of dementia value based on the extent to which their effective connectivity pattern conforms to a pattern that indicates dementia or a control-like pattern.They compared these predictions to the medical data of each patient, on record with the UK Biobank. The findings showed that the model had accurately predicted the onset of dementia up to nine years before an official diagnosis was made, and with greater than 80% accuracy. In the cases where the volunteers had gone on to develop dementia, it was also found that the model could predict within a two-year margin of error exactly how long it would take that diagnosis to be made.The researchers also examined whether changes to the DMN might be caused by known risk factors for dementia. Their analysis showed that genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease was strongly associated with connectivity changes in the DMN, supporting the idea that these changes are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that social isolation was likely to increase the risk of dementia through its effect on connectivity in the DMN.Potential Impact of the ResearchCharles Marshall, Professor and Honorary Consultant Neurologist, led the research team within the Centre for Preventive Neurology at Queen Mary’s Wolfson Institute of Population Health. He said: “Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia. Although we are getting better at detecting the proteins in the brain that can cause Alzheimer’s disease, many people live for decades with these proteins in their brains without developing symptoms of dementia. We hope that the measure of brain function that we have developed will allow us to be much more precise about whether someone is actually going to develop dementia, and how soon, so that we can identify whether they might benefit from future treatments.”Samuel Ereira, lead author and Academic Foundation Programme Doctor at the Centre for Preventive Neurology, Wolfson Institute of Population Health, said: “Using these analysis techniques with large datasets we can identify those at high dementia risk, and also learn which environmental risk factors pushed these people into a high-risk zone. Enormous potential exists to apply these methods to different brain networks and populations, to help us better understand the interplays between environment, neurobiology, and illness, both in dementia and possibly other neurodegenerative diseases. fMRI is a non-invasive medical imaging tool, and it takes about 6 minutes to collect the necessary data on an MRI scanner, so it could be integrated into existing diagnostic pathways, particularly where MRI is already used.”Hojjat Azadbakht, CEO of AINOSTICS (an AI company collaborating with world-leading research teams to develop brain imaging approaches for the early diagnosis of neurological disorders) said: “The approach developed has the potential to fill an enormous clinical gap by providing a non-invasive biomarker for dementia. In the study published by the team at QMUL, they were able to identify individuals who would later develop Alzheimer’s disease up to 9 years before they received a clinical diagnosis. It is during this pre-symptomatic stage that emerging disease-modifying treatments are likely to offer the most benefit for patients.”Reference: “Early detection of dementia with default-mode network effective connectivity” by Sam Ereira, Sheena Waters, Adeel Razi and Charles R. Marshall, 6 June 2024, Nature Mental Health.DOI: 10.1038/s44220-024-00259-5

Queen Mary University researchers have created a method to predict dementia with high accuracy years before diagnosis by analyzing brain network connectivity using fMRI scans....

Man With Alzheimer’s Dementia

Researchers have developed an innovative method for predicting dementia with over 80% accuracy, up to nine years before diagnosis. Using functional MRI to analyze the default mode network of the brain, the team could identify early signs of dementia by comparing brain connectivity patterns with genetic and health data from UK Biobank volunteers. This method not only improves early detection but also helps in understanding the interaction between genetic factors, social isolation, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Queen Mary University researchers have created a method to predict dementia with high accuracy years before diagnosis by analyzing brain network connectivity using fMRI scans.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have created a new technique that predicts dementia with over 80% accuracy up to nine years prior to diagnosis. This method surpasses traditional approaches like memory tests and measurements of brain shrinkage, two commonly used methods for diagnosing dementia.

The team, led by Professor Charles Marshall, developed the predictive test by analyzing functional MRI (fMRI) scans to detect changes in the brain’s ‘default mode network’ (DMN). The DMN connects regions of the brain to perform specific cognitive functions and is the first neural network to be affected by Alzheimer’s disease.

The researchers used fMRI scans from over 1,100 volunteers from UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing genetic and health information from half a million UK participants, to estimate the effective connectivity between ten regions of the brain that constitute the default mode network.

Predictive Accuracy and Methodology

The researchers assigned each patient with a probability of dementia value based on the extent to which their effective connectivity pattern conforms to a pattern that indicates dementia or a control-like pattern.

They compared these predictions to the medical data of each patient, on record with the UK Biobank. The findings showed that the model had accurately predicted the onset of dementia up to nine years before an official diagnosis was made, and with greater than 80% accuracy. In the cases where the volunteers had gone on to develop dementia, it was also found that the model could predict within a two-year margin of error exactly how long it would take that diagnosis to be made.

The researchers also examined whether changes to the DMN might be caused by known risk factors for dementia. Their analysis showed that genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease was strongly associated with connectivity changes in the DMN, supporting the idea that these changes are specific to Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that social isolation was likely to increase the risk of dementia through its effect on connectivity in the DMN.

Potential Impact of the Research

Charles Marshall, Professor and Honorary Consultant Neurologist, led the research team within the Centre for Preventive Neurology at Queen Mary’s Wolfson Institute of Population Health. He said: “Predicting who is going to get dementia in the future will be vital for developing treatments that can prevent the irreversible loss of brain cells that causes the symptoms of dementia. Although we are getting better at detecting the proteins in the brain that can cause Alzheimer’s disease, many people live for decades with these proteins in their brains without developing symptoms of dementia. We hope that the measure of brain function that we have developed will allow us to be much more precise about whether someone is actually going to develop dementia, and how soon, so that we can identify whether they might benefit from future treatments.”

Samuel Ereira, lead author and Academic Foundation Programme Doctor at the Centre for Preventive Neurology, Wolfson Institute of Population Health, said: “Using these analysis techniques with large datasets we can identify those at high dementia risk, and also learn which environmental risk factors pushed these people into a high-risk zone. Enormous potential exists to apply these methods to different brain networks and populations, to help us better understand the interplays between environment, neurobiology, and illness, both in dementia and possibly other neurodegenerative diseases. fMRI is a non-invasive medical imaging tool, and it takes about 6 minutes to collect the necessary data on an MRI scanner, so it could be integrated into existing diagnostic pathways, particularly where MRI is already used.”

Hojjat Azadbakht, CEO of AINOSTICS (an AI company collaborating with world-leading research teams to develop brain imaging approaches for the early diagnosis of neurological disorders) said: “The approach developed has the potential to fill an enormous clinical gap by providing a non-invasive biomarker for dementia. In the study published by the team at QMUL, they were able to identify individuals who would later develop Alzheimer’s disease up to 9 years before they received a clinical diagnosis. It is during this pre-symptomatic stage that emerging disease-modifying treatments are likely to offer the most benefit for patients.”

Reference: “Early detection of dementia with default-mode network effective connectivity” by Sam Ereira, Sheena Waters, Adeel Razi and Charles R. Marshall, 6 June 2024, Nature Mental Health.
DOI: 10.1038/s44220-024-00259-5

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The culverts under the crossing were installed to keep flooding under control, but they also churn the water, spewing noxious gas and other pollutants.  “The unintended consequence is that it’s exacerbating the release of all the molecules and aerosols into the air,” Aguirre said. “It’s literally rocketing them into the environment.” Hydrogen sulfide, with its distinctive rotten egg odor, is an indicator of that toxic brew, said Kim Prather, an atmospheric chemist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She raised the alarm about airborne pollution from the Tijuana River last year. Flooding caused by the Tijuana River covers a section of Saturn Boulevard after a rainy day in San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters Layers of foam caused by sewage and chemicals bubble up along a section of the Tijuana River after a rainy day in San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters Layers of foam caused by sewage and chemicals bubble up along a section of the Tijuana River after a rainy day in San Diego on Nov. 21, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters “That’s one in a cocktail of thousands of compounds,” she said. “It’s a blessing that it smells. I know it sounds strange, but it tells you to get away.” Aguirre described her own struggles with Tijuana River pollution, including migraines, chest pain, shortness of breath, and waking in the middle of the night to an odor she likened to a “porta potty.” Recent improvements to wastewater treatment plants in the U.S. and Mexico have reduced water pollution by keeping tens of millions of gallons of sewage out of the ocean each day. Aguirre and others celebrate that news, but note the river still contaminates surrounding areas. 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Imperial Beach sued the International Boundary and Water Commission with the city of Chula Vista and Port of San Diego in 2018, alleging that it violated the Clean Water Act and other federal laws by failing to control coastal sewage pollution. They settled the lawsuit in 2023 with a promise of more resources and binational cooperation.  “My tenure as mayor of IB really focused on advocating and working in a bipartisan fashion to secure the additional funding that was needed,” to fix cross-border pollution, she said. A person walks their dog near the Imperial Beach Pier in Imperial Beach on Nov. 21, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters Aguirre led delegations of local officials to Washington, D.C. to drum up money for costly infrastructure upgrades needed to get the sewage problem under control. She met with White House officials in both the Biden and Trump administrations, and with lawmakers who had served as Navy SEALS and had experienced the pollution problem at BUD/S, the Navy SEAL training program in Coronado. In July, Aguirre won a special election for an open San Diego County Board of Supervisors seat. She immediately led county plans to study the health effects of cross-border pollution and asked the state for $50 million to fix the Saturn Boulevard hot spot.  “She’s moved a problem that has been stuck, when other people could not,” Prather, the Scripps atmospheric chemist, said. Sewage spills prompt quick fixes The long-standing pollution problem came under new scrutiny in 2017, when a spill from a damaged line in Mexico dumped an estimated 143 million gallons of wastewater into the Tijuana River, sending foul odors wafting through the region. That accident revealed just how dilapidated the aging infrastructure had become. “That’s one of the reasons why things are so horrific, because they’re playing catch up on fixing these things when they have catastrophic failures,” said Feddersen, the Scripps oceanographer. In early 2022, another major spill released hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage-tainted water across the border for two and a half weeks.  That summer, San Diego congress members freed up more than $300 million that had been authorized for wastewater treatment upgrades through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Mexico committed $144 million to replace failing sewage treatment facilities in Tijuana, with an updated treaty between the two countries known as Minute 328. In 2024, the lawmakers persuaded the Biden administration to add another $370 million to repair the aging South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant near the border, Rep. Scott Peters said. After decades of deterioration, major improvements came online this year. The South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which was barely operable, is now fully functioning and expanded its capacity from 25 million to 35 million gallons of wastewater per day. The project was expected to take two years, but was completed in 100 days, according to the U.S. International Boundary and Water Commission. An aerial view shows a treated wastewater river heading to the Pacific Ocean near Real Del Mar in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico on Aug. 12, 2025. Photo by Guillermo Arias, AFP via Getty Images By the end of next year that will climb to 50 million gallons per day, with higher capacity for peak wastewater surges. The commission, which manages the wastewater systems, has spent $122 million on the first series fixes, and the full project will cost $650 million. Although the Trump administration has clawed back federal funding for many projects, it has doubled down on the cross-border sewage problem, Aguirre said. In July U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin met with his Mexican counterpart to seal the environmental deal. In April Mexico repaired its Punta Bandera plant, located on the coast about six miles south of the border. The plant had failed completely in 2020 and was dumping raw sewage into the ocean. It now handles 18 million gallons of wastewater per day. That’s a big boost for beach safety, said Feddersen, whose research tracked the flow of sewage in ocean currents and modeled scenarios for reducing it. “The best bang for the buck, the greatest reduction in beach closure and reduction in human illness, was fixing Punta Bandera,” he said. Yet, the Tijuana River still threatens residents in its watershed with untreated sewage and industrial chemicals from maquiladoras in Tijuana. That includes solvents, heavy metals and toxins known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” Prather said. “The river right now is a wastewater treatment plant without any processing,” she said. Removing the culverts would eliminate the turbulence that sprays out hydrogen sulfide and other toxins. The county plans to finish a feasibility study on the project by January. That project would keep contaminants out of the air, but not out of the water. Aguirre also wants new infrastructure to clean up the Tijuana River on the U.S. side. The recent binational Treaty, Minute 328, includes that option, and the International Boundary and Water Commission is exploring what it would take to divert and treat the river flows. There’s no funding for the project yet, but Aguirre says it’s on her agenda. “Rivers are diverted up and down,” she said.  “It’s doable. Is it expensive? Yes. Are our lives in South San Diego worth it? Yes.”

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Germophobes Can Breathe Easy On Airplanes, In Hospitals, Experts Say

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, Dec. 5, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Germophobes can breathe a little easier when visiting a hospital...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, Dec. 5, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Germophobes can breathe a little easier when visiting a hospital or taking an airplane trip, a new study says.The ambient air on planes and in hospitals mostly contains harmless microbes typically associated with human skin, researchers reported Dec. 4 in the journal Microbiome.The cutting-edge study analyzed germ samples captured on the outer surface of face masks worn by air travelers and health care workers, researchers said.“We realized that we could use face masks as a cheap, easy air-sampling device for personal exposures and general exposures,” senior researcher Erica Hartmann, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said in a news release.“We extracted DNA from those masks and examined the types of bacteria found there,” Hartmann said.Overall, the team analyzed germs drawn from masks worn by 10 air travelers and 12 health care professionals. Travelers turned in their masks following a flight, hospital workers following a shift.Researchers also analyzed germs captured by an aircraft cabin filter that had been used for more than 8,000 hours.Overall, the team found 407 distinct species of microbes.“Somewhat unsurprisingly, the bacteria were the types that we would typically associate with indoor air,” Hartmann said. “Indoor air looks like indoor air, which also looks like human skin.”A few potentially disease-causing germs did show up, but they were in extremely low amounts and without signs of active infection, researchers said.Hartmann’s team came up with the study idea in January 2022, amid the COVID pandemic.“At the time, there was a serious concern about COVID transmission on planes,” Hartmann said. “HEPA filters on planes filter the air with incredibly high efficiency, so we thought it would be a great way to capture everything in the air.”“But these filters are not like the filters in our cars or homes,” Hartmann added. “They cost thousands of dollars and, in order to remove them, workers have to pull the airplane out of service for maintenance. This obviously costs an incredible amount of money, and that was eye opening.”To beef up their project, the team turned to a much cheaper alternative: face masks.They also decided to include hospitals as another study locale.“As a comparison group, we thought about another population of people who were likely wearing masks anyway,” Hartmann said. “We landed on health care providers.”The results indicate that people themselves are the main source of airborne microbes in enclosed settings, and that most of the germs come from people’s skin rather than from any illnesses, researchers said.Although the results show indoor air is relatively safe, researchers noted that infectious germs also spread through other routes — most importantly, touch.“For this study, we solely looked at what’s in the air,” Hartmann said. “Hand hygiene remains an effective way to prevent diseases transmission from surfaces. We were interested in what people are exposed to via air, even if they are washing their hands.”SOURCES: Northwestern University, news release, Dec. 3, 2025; Microbiome, Dec. 4, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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Culture

Vanishing Springs

The Florida you know is a lie. In contrast to what Americans have been told, Florida’s magic is not found in the giant mouse, the rolling green golf courses, or in the beachside palaces. The beauty and uniqueness of Florida is under our feet - the aquifer. This pure, crystal clear water is the life blood of our state and without it, life as we know it in the sunshine state would not exist. This life sustaining force is only seen where it bubbles up to the surface through Florida’s collection of 1,000 springs. These springs were originally what drew society to this land. Wealthy tourists in the 1900’s flooded the Florida springs seeking medicinal cures from its pristine waters. As springs became a popular tourist destination, spring houses were built around these pools of water. When this development began, the springs began flowing less and some eventually stopped altogether. People assumed this was the natural order of this wonder and moved on. Theme parks, golf courses and resorts were erected to entice tourists to visit Florida, the natural beauty of the state soon faded out of our memory. The springs of Florida now silently suffer from the effects of continued development in Florida. The current strain we are placing on the fragile ecosystem is choking the life out of our state. Overdevelopment is one of the leading forces that is damaging the springs. The once pure sources of water no longer boil up like a fountain the way they have for centuries. The water that the springs do produce is polluted by nitrates. This pollution fuels the growth of toxic algae blooms, which are taking over springs and the rivers they feed, thus putting our health at risk. Over 90% of our drinking water gushes out of these sapphire pools. These glorious reservoirs have begun to shrink. If something is not done soon, the springs will simply become part of Florida history. In southern Florida they already have. Springs once bubbled up all across the state. They were wiped out in South Florida decades ago by the ditching and draining of the landscape as well as over-pumping of the aquifer. This water was then sprayed on suburban lawns and farmers' fields, run through showers and flushed down toilets, turned into steam to crank turbines for electricity, or siphoned into plastic bottles for sale around the country. Because of poor use and neglect of our greatest resource, we will soon be without this supply of fresh water. Floridians regard their water supply as abundant and cheap, when the fact is it's neither. Until this attitude changes, the springs will not be rescued.

Water
Conservation
Health

Riding Bikes with the Dutch

Michael Bauch, a Long Beach resident and independent filmmaker, noticed that many of his local errands involved short rides which were less than three miles. In the summer of 2007 he and his family went to Amsterdam, to document the biking and walking culture that is so natural to the Dutch people. The film suggests that we in the U.S. re-examine our view of bicycles.

Transportation
Culture
Health

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