Alzheimer’s disease (AD) could be the next frontier for deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy.

A small phase 1 pilot study showed that some patients with AD who received constant stimulation to the fornix — the principle outflow tract from the hippocampus — had increased hippocampal volume after 1 year.

There was also some evidence that this increased hippocampal volume correlated with cognitive benefit.

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Infants and toddlers with the Alzheimer’s disease-associated APOE4 genotype already showed distinctive patterns of brain structure relative to other young children, researchers said.

MRI scans carried out in 60 normally developing children, age 2 to 25 months, who carried the APOE epsilon-4 allele, showed smaller volumes of gray matter and and lower white matter myelin water fraction (MWF) compared with 102 children in the same age range whose APOE genes only include the epsilon-2 and/or epsilon-3 alleles, according to Sean C. L. Deoni, PhD, of Brown University in Providence, R.I., and colleagues.

“While our findings should be considered preliminary, this study demonstrates some of the earliest brain changes associated with the major genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease,” the researchers wrote online in JAMA Neurology.

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“Could a scoop of peanut butter and a ruler become that elusive test?”

If you treat the elderly, or any member of the growing number of families devastated by Alzheimer’s disease, you may be asked some version of that question, as posed by CBS News, in the coming weeks. You can thank media coverage of a study in the Oct. 15 issue of the Journal of Neurological Sciences titled “A Brief Olfactory Test for Alzheimer’s Disease.”

Here’s that brief olfactory test, as the CBS headline suggests: “A container of 14 g of peanut butter was opened, held medially at the bottom of a 30 cm ruler, and moved up 1 cm at a time during the participants’ exhale. Upon odor detection, the distance between the subject’s nostril and container was measured.”

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