Vascular Aspects in Dementia: Part 2

Vascular reactivity - BOLD amplitude,Vascular reactivity - time-to-peak,Vascular reactivity - time-to-baseline

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.