HealthDay (11/2, Thompson) reports, “Subtle feelings of loneliness might warn of impending Alzheimer’s disease in older folks,” researchers say after finding that “healthy seniors with elevated brain levels of amyloid – a type of protein fragment associated with Alzheimer’s disease – seem more likely to feel lonely than people with lower levels of amyloid.”
Healio (11/2, Oldt) points out, “Cognitively normal older adults with higher cortical amyloid burden or apolipoprotein E 4 were more likely to report loneliness, suggesting it may be a neuropsychiatric symptom of preclinical Alzheimer’s disease,” researchers theorized after conducting “cross-sectional analyses of data from the Harvard Aging Brain Study for 79 community-dwelling participants” in which “cortical amyloid burden was measured by Pittsburgh Compound B-positron emission tomography (PiB-PET).”
The findings were published online Nov. 2 in JAMA Psychiatry. The author of an accompanying editorial observed that the study’s conclusions merit “replication in larger samples and longitudinal designs.”
Related Links:
— “Could Loneliness Be an Early Sign of Alzheimer’s?,” Dennis Thompson, HealthDay, November 2, 2016.