视网膜辅助阿尔茨海默症的早期诊断

Assisting early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease by retina

阿尔茨海默症(Alzheimer’s disease,AD)是一种神经系统退行性疾病,常见于老年患者,现已成为世界范围内最常见的老年痴呆疾病,迄今仍未发现效果显著的治疗方法。AD患者的认知障碍往往在脑中发生第一次退行性改变数年后才出现,同时,它的诊断方法多具侵入性、非常规、价格高昂。AD是对全人类健康的挑战,也是严峻的公共卫生问题。因此,急需确定一种能够在患病早期检测到阿尔茨海默症的新型生物标记。由于阿尔茨海默症患者通常表现出明确的视觉缺陷,且这种缺陷有时在患者认知障碍的初次表现之前就已经出现,故近年来,以视网膜辅助AD早期诊断的新概念引起了极大关注。这种概念有望为AD的早期诊断提供新方法。

Alzheimer’s disease(AD)is a neurodegenerative disease.AD,common in elderly patients,has become the most common senile dementia all around the world and no effective cure has been found to date.At the same time,its diagnosis is often invasive,non-routine or pricy,which is a great challenge to the health of human kind and is a serious public health issue.Therefore,it is urgent to identify a new biomarker that can detect Alzheimer’s disease during the early stage.In recent years,the concept of using retina early diagnosis of AD has attracted significant attention due to the fact that AD patients usually display clear visual defects,which sometimes even appear before the initial manifestation of cognitive disorders.This concept is expected to provide a new method for early diagnosis of AD.