Detect Early Symptoms of Alzheimer’s Through Your Eyes – wel.nl

The eyes are more than a window to the soul – they are also a reflection of one’s cognitive health.

“The eye is the window to the brain,” ophthalmologist Dr. Christine Greer tells CNN. “You can see directly into the nervous system by looking into the back of the eye, toward the optic nerve and retina.”

One day, doctors may be able to use eye tests to identify cognitive decline soon after it begins.

Research has explored how the eye can help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms start. The disease is well advanced as behavior changes and memory falters.

“Alzheimer’s disease begins in the brain decades before the first symptoms of memory loss appear,” says Dr Richard Isaacson, a neurologist specializing in Alzheimer’s disease.

If doctors can identify the disease in its earliest stages, people can choose healthy lifestyles and control their “modifiable risk factors, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes,” Isaacson said.

How early can we see signs of cognitive decline? To find out, researchers collected retinal and brain tissue samples from 86 human donors with Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment over 14 years — the largest group of retinal samples ever studied, according to the authors.

“Our study is the first to provide in-depth analyzes of the protein profiles and the molecular, cellular and structural effects of Alzheimer’s disease in the human retina and how they correlate with changes in brain and cognitive function,” said senior author Maya Koronyo- Hamaoui, a professor of neurosurgery and biomedical sciences at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, said in a statement.

“These changes in the retina correlated with changes in parts of the brain called the entorhinal and temporal cortex, a hub for memory, navigation and the perception of time,” Koronyo-Hamaoui said.

“These findings may ultimately lead to the development of imaging techniques that allow us to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease earlier and more accurately,” said Isaacson, “and monitor its progression non-invasively by looking through the eye.”