Abstracts - Association for Chemoreception Sciences

#P23 POSTER SESSION I:
MULTIMODAL RECEPTION; CHEMOSENSATION
AND DISEASE; OLFACTION PERIPHERY
#P24 POSTER SESSION I:
MULTIMODAL RECEPTION; CHEMOSENSATION
AND DISEASE; OLFACTION PERIPHERY
Primary Olfactory Cortex is affected in Alzheimer’s
Disease and Mild Cognitively Impaired Patients:
A neuroimaging study
Megha Vasavada 1 , Jianli Wang 1 , Xiaoyu Sun 1 , Christopher
Weitekamp 1 , Paul Eslinger 2 , Prasanna Karunanayaka 1 ,
Sarah Ryan 1 , Qing Yang 1,3
1
Radiology, Penn State College of Medicine Hershey, PA, USA,
2
Neurology, Penn State College of Medicine Hershey, PA, USA,
3
Neurosurgery, Penn State College of Medicine Hershey, PA, USA
Alzheimer’s Disease is a neurodegenerative disorder affecting
5.4 million Americans and it is the 6 th leading cause of death.
Diagnosis of the disease is made when the pathology has
progressed to the neocortex and the effectiveness of drug
intervention is unlikely. Therefore, early diagnosis is key in
understanding the disease progression and unlocking a cure. It
has been shown that the pathology of AD (amyloid beta plaques
(Ab) and neurofibrillary tangles (NFT)) are first found in areas
involved in olfaction. Decreased sense of smell is seen in the
earliest stages of AD and in Mild Cognitive Impaired (MCI)
patients. In this study we used olfactory functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and volumetric MRI to examine the
relationship between the functional deficit and the pathological
changes (atrophy) in the primary olfactory cortex (POC) and
in the hippocampus in 23 cognitively normal controls (NC), 19
MCI, and 15 AD subjects. The volumetric data shows that the
volume of the POC is significantly different between the three
groups (p