Update on neuroimaging in Alzheimer's disease

The purpose of this review was to discuss the contribution of the most recent neuroimaging studies to our understanding of the mechanisms underlying Alzheimer's disease.

Studies have applied cross-sectional and longitudinal positron emission tomography (PET), structural and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to primarily investigate (1) how Alzheimer's disease pathological hallmarks like tau and amyloid-beta build up and spread across the brain at different disease stage and in different disease phenotypes and (2) how the spreading of these proteins is related to atrophy, to neuronal network disruption and to neuroinflammation.

The findings of these studies offer insight on the mechanisms that drive the pathological and clinical progression of Alzheimer's disease, highlighting their multifactorial nature, which is a crucial aspect for the development of disease-modifying therapeutics and can be captured with multimodal imaging approaches.