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Researchers in the United Kingdom and Slovenia found that certain breathing patterns and brain activity could signal Alzheimer’s disease.
How Did the Scientists Discover This?
One of the team’s primary goals was to investigate how brain oxygen saturation is related to neurodegenerative diseases. The researchers compared brain oxygen saturation levels, heart rates, brain wave activity, and respiratory effort in 19 patients with Alzheimer’s disease and 20 participants without the diagnosis (the control group).
The analysis revealed differences in neurons that are associated with blood vessels, as well as variations in blood oxygen levels during neuron activation.
In patients with Alzheimer’s, the synchronization of blood flow and brain activity was significantly disrupted. Moreover, the researchers were surprised to find that these patients had a higher breathing rate compared with those in the control group: 17 breaths per minute versus 13.
This may result from changes in the connection between the brain’s blood vessels and deeper neural tissue, which together ensure a rich oxygen supply.
“This intriguing discovery, in my opinion, is revolutionary; it could open up an entirely new world in the study of Alzheimer’s disease,” noted co-author Aneta Stefanowska from Lancaster University (UK). She believes these findings will help medical professionals detect and treat inflammation in the brain more accurately and, in the future, prevent severe forms of Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers emphasized that diagnosing the condition only requires attaching electrical and optical sensors to the scalp. Blood or tissue samples are not needed. This makes the detection method cheaper and faster than many other diagnostic options, according to ScienceAlert.
While breathing patterns alone are currently insufficient to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, studying those patterns in future research will help create a more complete picture of the disease’s symptoms.
This supports the hypothesis that Alzheimer’s disease is caused by dysfunction in the brain’s vascular system, leading to reduced efficiency in oxygen delivery and in the removal of toxic substances.
“The vascular system and the brain work together to ensure the brain receives enough energy. In fact, the brain requires about 20 percent of the body’s total energy consumption, despite weighing only about two percent of total body weight,” noted neurologist Bernard Meglič from the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia).
The study’s results were published in the journal Brain Communications.
