A new study has found that patterns of how one's brain shrinks in Alzheimer's disease is unique to them, almost like a "fingerprint" -- a result that researchers said could enable more personalised medicines to be developed.

While brain shrinkage is known to occur in everyone because of ageing-related cognitive decline, excess brain shrinkage has been shown to occur in patients of Alzheimer's disease, compared to healthy people, which can be measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

However, patterns of how the brain shrinks varies between people, and the information could help understanding how one's cognitive performance changes with time, the researchers, including those at the University College London, UK, said. Patients of Alzheimer's disease have affected memory, thinking and decision-making, which can interfere with their daily functioning.

The team looked at about 63,000 brain scans for identifying "fingerprints" of the neurodegenerative condition and found that even as most participants started out with similar-sized brains, the patterns of brain shrinkage differed between individuals over time.

Among people in the preceding stage of having mild memory issues, those developing a higher number of brain areas that had shrunk more-than-normal are at a higher chance of developing Alzheimer's disease, the researchers said.

On average, the patients of Alzheimer's disease had 15 to 20 of such rapidly shrinking brain regions at the study's start and ended up with around 30 after three years, the team found.

In contrast, the patients having mild memory issues were found to start with around five to 10 rapidly shrinking brain regions and develop only two to three more of these after three years, they said.

Having a higher number of rapidly shrinking brain regions was found to be associated with a poorer memory in both groups. The findings are published in the journal Alzheimer's and Dementia.

"The approach taken in our study means we can get a better sense of individual variability in Alzheimer's disease progression. By making these brain maps, which are unique 'fingerprints' of a patient's brain health, we can spot if separate brain regions are changing and how rapidly," senior author James Cole, from the University College London, said.

The researchers said the results could eventually help predict how an individual's Alzheimer's illness will progress based on early changes in their brain, as identified in scans.

The results could also enable more personalised medicines to be developed, targeted at the specific brain areas affected in an individual, they said.

The scans were taken from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Over 3,200 scans were from patients of Alzheimer's disease or mild memory issues and more than 58,800 were from healthy people.

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